*Cough* JERK *Cough*

I work — well, technically “worked,” since I was laid off when the hotel temporarily closed until the world goes back to normal — as a hotel night auditor, and one of the other clerks has rubbed me the wrong way since he was hired last fall. From the get-go, he has come across as smarmy and arrogant. He’ll always compliment you to your face, while back-biting other employees, in a way that tells you he is doing the exact same thing about you to the others.

Even months after training, he still makes mistakes — entering guest information wrong, not following established procedures, and that sort of thing — and whenever I try to show him the right way to do it, he’ll tell me that someone ELSE told him to do it the way he IS doing it.

There were other things that annoy me about him — like his habit of reorganizing the front desk every few days — but nothing that’s really pertinent to this story.

A few weeks ago, when the pandemic was still in the early stages, after the shift change in the morning, he coughed without even trying to cover his mouth. We had a group of travellers sitting in the lobby. I called him out on it, and the conversation went something like this:

Me: “Dude, you should really cover your mouth when you cough.”

Coworker: “Yeah, whatever.”

Me: “Seriously. I mean, with that outbreak on the go, you need to be more careful about that.”

Coworker: *Smirking* “Yeah, like I’m just coming back from China or something.”

Me: “Look, there are people in the lobby that are travelling who knows where, and the last thing they need in the middle of an outbreak is to see you coughing all over the place.”

Coworker: “Hey, if I’ve got to cough, I’m gonna cough.”

I could see I wasn’t getting anywhere with him, and frankly, if I’d kept at it, it would’ve turned into a shouting match, so I dropped it.

I had that night and the next one off. When I went back to work a couple of nights later, I found out that the owners had closed our sister hotel and laid off most of the staff. Our manager had laid HIM off, as well, apparently for coming to work sick.

They closed our hotel about a week later, and from what I understand, that coworker won’t be asked back when it reopens. Apparently, the owners liked him even less than I did, and coming in sick at the start of a worldwide outbreak was the last straw. I can’t honestly say I’ll miss him.