The health crisis has been going on for a year already and most companies have geared up to provide online training. Not all their departments have gotten the memo, apparently. 

The law demands that one of our workers attend safety training provided by the client company. The training department of the client company is okay with the worker viewing the course and answering the proficiency quiz online, BUT their concierge will not even consider processing the access request until they have received the course attendance form signed by the worker, who’s a thousand miles from our office and actually closer to the client site but does not have access to a printer, scanner, or fax. It’s a stall.

Coworker: “Wait, who’s the guy who needs to sign the form?”

Me: “Our [Worker].”

Coworker: “Oh, print the form and hand it here. My father’s name is [Name Similar To Worker’s] and I could forge his signature in middle school. How hard can this be?”

The forged signature was perfect, and the concierge accepted the faxed form. The work went smoothly after that.

I’m shopping in this family-run record store. The sweet old guy who normally runs it is in hospital. While the service sucks now, I still try to make the effort to go there first before shopping online.

No sooner do I step in the store than I get barged forcefully to one side by a guy running with armfuls of CDs. I turn to see him get into a waiting car and crash his way out of the car park.

I’m pretty shocked to see the member of staff on duty not even looking up.

Me: “That guy just hit me and ran out the store. I’m guessing he stole all those CDs.”

The worker stares at me blankly.

Me: “You’re not going to call the police or ask me for his licence plate?”

Worker: “They don’t pay me to care.”

Me: “Wow. Well, I doubt the owner of that Fiesta shares your sentiment.”

Worker: “What?!”

He ran outside — just short of pushing me out of the way, too! The thief had hit the corner of his car. It looked pretty bad; the wheel was bent at a weird angle. The worker wouldn’t be driving that car any time soon.

Suddenly, he wanted to hear what I had to say, and as tempted as I was to tell him that he didn’t pay me to care, I told him to call the police and figure out what was missing (several times) if he wanted me to make a statement.

The old guy who runs the shop got out of hospital and made a full recovery. The worker was his nephew, and he nearly ran the place into the ground. The store slowly got back to where it had been before when people heard the old guy was back running the store.

Back in the mid-1980s, when computers were just starting to be widespread in business, autosave was a thing of the very near future but not here yet.

I was a secretary at a law firm and got transferred to the newly created IT department. I did training, setups, and troubleshooting, and I reported to a newly hired but experienced IT manager.

One attorney was having a meltdown because her computer froze and she had been working all morning on a contract for a multimillion-dollar project.

Me: “No problem. We can do a reset and restore it from the last time you saved it.”

Attorney: “I haven’t had time to save it!”

She kept screaming at me to get it back. She hadn’t saved it. Not once. A multimillion-dollar deal. Worked on it for hours. Didn’t. Have. Time. To. Save. It.

When I broke the news that there wasn’t a d***ed thing we could do, I thought she was quite literally going to have a stroke. She was screaming so loud that someone called my boss, who listened to her spit-flecked tantrum. When he heard her say that she hadn’t once saved this oh-so-important document, he said:

Boss: “You didn’t save it. It’s gone. What do you want me to do, [Attorney]? Wave my magic wand to get it back? Get it back from where?”

To this day, I’m still astounded that this woman, who had four years of college and another two to three years of law school, didn’t have the common sense to save her work periodically as it progressed, and then screamed at people who were only trying to help her.

We have a big site visit soon, so unusually, I go around the yard and check everything is in order. I see a guy out of place looking around.

Me: “Can I help you?”

Man: “Err, yes, I’m here for the bins.”

Me: “Bins? What bins?”

Man: “The big metal ones.”

Me: “And what would you want with them?”

Man: “Well, I was told that I could.”

He begins muttering and walks away. I manage to get a photo of his car as he drives away. I let security know and they thank me. In fact, it gives them the cause to get and install that camera they’ve been meaning to.

A few weeks later:

Security: “I think your friend turned up again.”

Me: “Who?”

Security: “That guy you took a photo of.”

Me: “Oh, really? What did he want?”

Security: “He tried to break into the yard. Is this him?”

He shows me a close-up, high-resolution photo of the guy in the car.

Me: “Yeah, that’s him. How did you get such a great photo?” 

Security: “Oh, he drove into the new security camera. It nearly landed on his bonnet. He still tried breaking in after that, though.”

Me: “Not the smartest guy, then?”

The police caught him not long after. The best part was that he was the brother of one of the guys working there. They must have been working together. Unfortunately for both of them, the scrap bins were emptied for the visit, so he stole nothing. The would-be thief got jail time and his brother got the sack.

Like so many others, I was laid off because of the health crisis. I start filling out job applications. One application is for an office job writing bids at a security contractor in my old hometown. I’ve never heard of the company before, but they have a very distinctive name.

I don’t think anything of it, but lo and behold, I get a call back from a third-party Human Resources person on behalf of that company to vet me for the role. Everything goes okay, except the HR representative says that the job is at a company with a similar but obviously not the same name as the one I applied to. I pull up the company’s website — which, please note, is full of buzzwords like “honor,” “trust,” and, “integrity” — while I am talking to the HR representative, and it appears that both companies are subsidiaries of the same parent company. The parent company actually has roughly a half-dozen subsidiaries, all with similar names. We both figure that someone on their end made a mistake, and the HR representative says he’ll forward my resume to the company.

Fast forward a week. The company’s hiring manager calls me. The interview goes well… right up until I ask which company I’ll be working for.

Hiring Manager: “Oh, it’s all the same company. Those are just the different brands we operate as. See, most of our work is with the Federal Government, and according to the rules, if you’re awarded a government contract, once that contract expires, you can only re-bid on it once. In other words, if you win the contract twice in a row, you can’t bid on it again. So, when that happens, we re-bid for the contract under a different name. That way, we never actually lose the contract.”

The more he described the company and why it was structured the way it was, the more it became incredibly obvious that the whole thing had been deliberately and specifically set up in such a way as to enable them to cheat their way into government contracts. The office I’d be working in was actually a small satellite office with just the owner’s brother and maybe one other family member, not corporate HQ as indicated in the job listing; most of the workers were clear on the other side of the country. And the more he described the office and my actual responsibilities — I’d have basically been a glorified secretary for the owner’s brother — the less and less comfortable I became.

The interview FINALLY ended, and the hiring manager said he’d be in touch. Thankfully, I never heard back from them. First and only place I’ve ever interviewed where I’m glad they ghosted me. Forget the creepy work arrangement and their lying about what the actual job was; I have too much integrity — actual integrity, not just a buzzword on a website — to knowingly work for a bunch of admitted crooks. Plus, I don’t want to be within a mile of any of their offices when they finally get raided by the Feds. And let’s be real: if they’re dumb enough to out-and-out admit they’re fraudsters to a prospective employee, it’s only a matter of time before they get shut down and the execs get thrown in prison.