She Should Be Made To Stand Facing The Wall For A Bit
During the [health crisis] lockdown, we had a lot of people working remotely, but not everyone. In the first few weeks, we had an issue with individuals freelancing in the building and using random desks either to chase the air-conditioning which turns off in certain areas after hours, or just for “a change of scenery” as the weather changed.
Our CEO had correctly assumed that [health crisis] mandates would drag on for an extended period of time, so all of these desks were packed out and cleared, but the computers of people working remotely couldn’t be touched. If someone logged into one of these PCs, the remote user would get booted out.
Solving this issue was simple; we turned the monitors around at the desks that we didn’t want people to use and made some announcements about it.
Fast forward about two and a half thousand years to the end of the mandates. The building is filling up again and IT support tickets are flying into the office for us to handle as everyone returns to physical work. I receive one from our audit department and call the extension.
Me: “Hello? [Employee]?”
Employee: “Yes! Hi!”
Me: “Hi, this is [My Name] from the IT services division. We received a ticket about your computer not working?”
Employee: “Yes! I turned it on, but it’s just a black screen that says, ‘Dell’.”
Me: “Hmmm, so the monitors are working?”
Employee: “Yes.”
I troubleshoot with this individual for about forty-five minutes. She starts to get angrier and angrier and more and more frustrated with each moment we are working. Eventually, she starts yelling at us, throwing around her title as the department manager, and questioning our competency. I go up to her desk physically to see if I can get anything from a visual perspective since I am able to remotely log into her machine and move freely around the desktop.
When I arrive, she’s sitting at her desk steaming. As an added petty move, she had even turned the monitors back around to face the wall.
Employee: “Finally!”
Me: “Move!”
Employee: “Excuse me?!”
Me: “MOVE!”
Something changes in her face. I think it is at this point that she might realize that she has pushed too far. She moves out of the way and I grab the monitors and spin them back around. The desktop is displaying normally.
Me: “So, what’s the problem?”
Employee: “Oh! They were turned around?”
That is it; that is the last straw. I give her back every single bit of yelling and grief that she has burdened us with over the phone for the last hour, drawing the attention of her employees. I lay out exactly why she has no business calling anyone incompetent when she can’t tell the back of a computer monitor from the front and inform her that I will be filing a report with Human Resources for her abuse of my staff due to her stupidity. I also invite her to file a report against me if she wants and storm out of the office, slamming the door to the department so hard that the small window inset into it shatters.
Fast forward two weeks.
I am sitting in Human Resources, having just come back from a mandated vacation due to the incident. The HR representative walks in.
Representative: “I’ll get right to it.”
I am fully expecting to get fired at this point.
Representative: “The main office has accepted your offer to pay for the glass due to your insistence on doing so; it came up to around $230.”
Me: “That’s cheap, actually.”
Representative: “Hmmm, yes, well, the glass is meant to be replaced.”
Me: “I see.”
Representative: “We reviewed the recorded call between you and [Employee] and determined that, while your outburst in Audit was completely outside of our code of conduct, the main office decided that it was… not acceptable, but understandable due to [Employee]’s racist comments and the demeaning nature in the call.”
Me: “Racist?”
Representative: “Yes. The fact that you maintained your professionalism while she was throwing around phrases I cannot repeat was nothing short of amazing.”
Was I so tied up in the computer issue that I missed this? I don’t recall hearing anything that could have been considered racism.
Representative: “So, it has been decided that you are free to return to work. The pay for the last two weeks is yours to keep; we’re going to change the status on record to ‘administrative leave.’ However, we need to insist that you do not have a repeat incident. You have an entire team under your control. If you are feeling hot under the collar, please utilize them instead of dispatching to calls yourself. That being said, you will be serving a month of probation because we can’t outright ignore what happened in Audit. We’ll set your start date for Monday at 8:00 am; you can slide right back into the schedule.”
Me: “Understandable. What about [Employee]?”
Representative: “I can’t discuss the punishments and actions taken against former employees.”
Me: “Oh, of— ‘Former’?”
The representative smiles but does not make eye contact with me as she straightens her paperwork and stands up.
Representative: “Policies, you know.”
Without another word, she walked out of the room.
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