Color Us Blind For Hiring Him!  

I used to work in an abattoir/meat processing factory as an IT Infrastructure Engineer. I was first-line support, and although I was primarily responsible for desktop PCs, laptops, and servers, I did occasionally work alongside our factory IT support technicians, who maintained all the IT equipment used on the factory production lines.

Management once hired a young man who proved himself to be the most inept IT support technician any of us had ever had to work with. He was a really nice guy, in truth; it’s just a shame he was so inept and clueless when it came to his job. The problems with him all started during his first week on the job, when he announced that he was colour-blind. This wouldn’t have been an issue normally, except that he hadn’t bothered to disclose this information at interview, and since part of his job required him being able to do basic electrical wiring, you can see why colour-blindness would be a problem!

During his first few weeks, he nearly got the other factory technician in trouble. He couldn’t remember how to do something she had trained him to do, and instead of admitting that he couldn’t remember, he told our boss she hadn’t bothered to train him. Thankfully, our boss chose to believe her — backed up by my own testimony. We also discovered that our colleague didn’t believe in overtime, and at the end of his shifts he would drop what he was doing — sometimes literally — clock out and go home, even if he hadn’t finished his work. This nearly got our department into trouble once when he went home for the weekend having dismantled an important piece of factory equipment that was needed that evening. When our manager spoke to him about it, he did his usual trick of blaming us “for not telling him it was a business-critical machine.” The fact that most of the equipment on a production line is business-critical was lost on him.

His behaviour took a different turn when he got a new girlfriend. She had a daughter with her ex-boyfriend — whom she literally couldn’t stand — and used to use her powers of manipulation to bully our colleague into taking unauthorised absences from work to be with her and her daughter. These ranged from a couple of days off work “because of an ear infection” to getting his GP to sign him off work for “stress,” at a time which rather conveniently coincided with his girlfriend’s daughter’s school holidays. I suppose we technically shouldn’t blame him for these as he claimed he was only trying to keep her happy. He later got her pregnant and spent the next few months complaining about how he wasn’t ready to be a father.

Our manager eventually left the company, but not before warning his replacement about our colleague. A few days after the new manager arrived, we came into work to discover that our colleague had handed in his notice and was now leaving in four weeks. Or so we thought! At around 10:00 am that morning, he took a mysterious phone call to his work phone, said, “Okay, yep, I’m coming now,” and walked out. He was later seen sneaking round the far side of our premises, trying to avoid the perimeter CCTV cameras. He took with him a lot of company property, including his uniform. Our bosses decided it wasn’t worth pursuing this as theft and decided to write it off.

We were later told by the factory supervisors that he’d lied to them about “how much we all hated him” and that “we never trained him then blamed him for not knowing things.”