I was hired by proxy as a character designer for a game developer who’d had some success. This was the original briefing:

Client: “We want a strong, solid female character. Young archeologist, don’t fall into Lara Croft or feminine Indiana Jones. Heroic, the adventurous type.”

Just that. Nothing else.

I sent the first draft.

Client: “This looks amazing. I have some suggestions, nevertheless.”

The suggestions, in about ten to fifteen revisions, included things like redrawing the right boot heel with a 10° inclination, adding half an inch (proportional, of course) to the satchel length, switching the angle of the light (?), and restructuring her nose bridge a few pixels width with three different MS Paint images.

This went on. What broke the camel’s back was this:

Me: “I can’t be doing more revisions. You keep returning the demos with lots of little insignificant changes, based on nothing sent in the original brief.”

Client: “This has to be perfect, and it gets more and more difficult to work with you. You keep missing the major key of the character. She’s not heroic or adventurous yet. It’s you who is wasting our time.”

Me: “What? I designed a young female archaeologist, clearly strong and self-confident. Adventurous and heroic.”

Client: “SHE’S NOT A REDHEAD! HOW COULD YOU MISS THAT?”

Me: “You didn’t tell me to draw a redhead!”

Client: “It’s pretty obvious that if she’s heroic, she has to be a redhead. I can’t believe I’ve gotta explain this to you.”

I asked the proxy if I could be harsh firing the client. She said yes.

I’m happy now.

I’ve been running a team for a while and, if you believe the team scores, not doing too badly at all. Then, I get a notice that an employee is transferring to my team — non-negotiable, very little detail, something about a legal claim.

Just great. This won’t end well, I know it.

Day 1 is training. On Day 2, apparently, his training wasn’t good enough. He moaned so much that he got a second day.

On Day 3, I take him down to the team and ask that he watches the jobs, just to be sure. On Day 4, I get him to do a few little jobs — nothing taxing.

On Day 5, I pull him aside to see how his first week went.

At this point, he has done maybe two hours of work. The rest of the team has nothing positive to say about him (which has never happened before), and he has an attitude.

Me: “So, how did this week go?”

Employee: “Okay, I guess. A bit boring, isn’t it?”

Me: “Well, you’ve only just started. I would give it a chance.”

Employee: “Yeah, well, they haven’t really trained me properly.”

Me: “Oh, really?”

The job is entry-level, requiring no formal experience as long as you can read with basic comprehension. The job is mostly pushing the right colour button. The complicated stuff that needs comprehension is left to the guys who have been here a while.

Employee: “Yeah, they don’t really say anything.”

Me: “Okay, well, I will look into that. And next week, we will try again.”

The next week is more of [Employee] being in the way rather than doing anything. I plead with Human Resources to move him on. But clearly, something has gone on, and we are stuck with him.

The team starts to complain about him, and I can’t see anything he has achieved. At the end of the week, I pull him to the side.

Me: “How are you getting on? I’m not seeing a lot of completed jobs under your name…”

Employee: “Yeah, I’ve been getting the others to sign mine off.”

Me: “Okay, well, that shouldn’t happen; they should know better. Listen. We will give it one more week, okay?”

He mutters something, and he doesn’t dare repeat it when asked. I write everything down as I feel I might need it.

The next week, there are more complaints, and there’s no real work done. I pull him aside.

Me: “I’m not sure this is working out. Can you give me any reason why you’re not completing any work? Not raising any concerns?”

Employee: “I told you, I’m doing the work, and they are signing it off!”

Me: “You realise I’ve talked to them, right? They told me you barely do anything and they have to do it for you! That’s why they sign it off.”

Employee: “You think you could do my job? Huh? If it’s so easy?”

Me: “I don’t need to be able to do your job; I need to make sure you have all the tools and ability to do your job — which I have done, and yet you still are unable to do so. I think we need to take this to HR.”

Employee: “Yeah, well, I’m untouchable. You can’t do s***.”

After a long conversation with HR, I finally found out that they had botched [Employee]’s termination for something — something about a fight — and had to dump him on another department.

The fact that he refused to do any work and my documentation, however, were enough to get rid of him properly. I did have strong words with HR that day about being a dumping ground, and I got an apology and a promise never to do that again.

We had a new hire get fired during training because she thought it was funny to prop her filthy feet (she was wearing sandals) on the shoulders of other new hires in the class. The trainer told her in no uncertain terms that this was inappropriate behavior and it needed to stop NOW!

New Hire: *Giggling* “I’m not hurting anyone.”

That didn’t go over well with the trainer or her classmates, but she “behaved” herself for the rest of the morning. Then, she decided to do it again after their lunch break.

This time, it didn’t go well for her. The classmate she propped her feet up on reached up and shoved the bottoms of her sandals so hard that her chair wheeled backward for a short distance and then tipped over, leaving her sprawled on the floor screaming her head off.

Just then, the trainer walked into the classroom.

Trainer: “Shut up, get up, grab your stuff, and go to the site supervisor’s office.”

There, she was promptly fired. [Trainer] told me later that she was screaming at the site supervisor:

New Hire: “[Classmate] should be fired, too! He assaulted me!”

Yeah, no. Not gonna happen.

When I was in my early twenties, I worked at a small, family-owned Italian restaurant. The owner mentioned that the restaurant sales were down, and he was going to hire his sister, a woman in her fifties, as a hostess because “we (servers) must be doing something wrong”. We were all kind of shocked at that. I mean, we had noticed that it had been slower, but we were still dealing with the aftermath of the 2008 recession, so we assumed it had to do with that. Also, we didn’t have any complaints other than the wait time — the restaurant made almost all the food by hand — so we were confused.

I’m going to quickly explain how we did the hostessing in the restaurant. Every Friday and Saturday, we would rotate one of the servers and have them hostess. We would be paid more, and the servers would tip us out. As hostesses, we didn’t just seat people; we would also bus tables and run food if needed. We didn’t have a busser or table runner since, again, it was a small restaurant. (I think the maximum we could have in the dining room was seventy-five, and twenty in the bar. We also didn’t have sections, so the hostess would rotate who got seated next.

On the owner’s sister’s first day, she was supposed to start at 4:00 pm, but she hadn’t shown up yet. We had people waiting at the door to be seated. We quickly searched for [Sister] and couldn’t find her, so we seated the people. Of course, once we seated them, [Sister] showed up and immediately berated me.

Sister: “I’m the hostess! You are not allowed to seat people!”

I had never met [Sister] at this point. All I could think was, “Great. Here we go.”

For two years, I put up with [Sister]. She would berate us, and she would not allow us to enter our tips into the computer when she was working, even though we did that all the time by ourselves. She questioned me on a good tip I got and asked the guy if he was “sure he wanted to give me that much,” because she couldn’t believe that I had gotten that tip. The guy flipped out and yelled at the owner.

Another time, she gave every customer the owner’s number because she was mad at us for not busing our tables, and she told them to complain. We were slammed and could have used her help busing. Oh, yeah! She wouldn’t bus any tables or run any food; she would just seat people, and we had to tip her out.

She would shove trays into our hands if we were carrying out one plate; it didn’t matter, she said it was classier to carry everything on a tray. She would go between liking me and hating me because I’m not a pushover. She mostly hated me.

[Sister] also took everything as an insult. You would think you were having a normal conversation with her, and then she would get mad about what you said. When she first started working, she told me she had hosted before. Being friendly, I asked where. She got mad at me for that because she thought I was being snarky about her hostess skills; I wasn’t.

At one point, we were so fed up that we asked [Manager] (the head chef of the kitchen) to please talk to [Owner] about his sister. [Owner] set up a meeting with us. Right before the meeting started, [Sister] showed up, and all of us looked at each other, confused as to why she was there. [Owner] then berated us for treating his sister poorly and said that we needed to treat her better. We were all so pissed.

One server did quit over her. [Sister] really hated her. When we would hostess, we would write down each server’s name and make a chart of how many people/tables they had taken to make it fair for each person. The server’s name was Lacy, and [Sister] wrote her name down as “Lazy” because she was annoyed that Lacy wasn’t busing her tables because she was busy. Lacy quit and wrote a note to the owner saying [Sister] was the reason she quit. [Owner] still didn’t see an issue.

It started getting to the point that I was going to quit. I have no idea why I put up with it for so long, but I made good money and I knew the place. [Sister] was not giving me tables at all one night. I was talking to [Manager].

Me: “If she doesn’t give me a table, I’m quitting.”

He reached out to [Owner], who told [Sister] she needed to give me tables. She pouted, refused to work, stood at the entrance, and loudly called people on her cell to complain. Since she refused to hostess, [Manager] had to that night. [Owner] only (thankfully) listened at this point because he was starting to get multiple complaints about [Sister] but still hadn’t fired her because she was his sister.

Then came the straw that broke the camel’s back.

I’m good at computers and learn super fast. I learned our Point Of Sale system very quickly when we got it and was even given manager abilities on it because I understood it so well.

Our POS system was at the waitress station, and [Sister] was helping another server with an issue. [Owner] wanted to discount one person’s food on a table that had one bill. If you selected the food and hit “discount”, it would discount the entire order, so you had to split the order to discount it; it didn’t separate the checks doing it that way. I had tried to help [Sister] with the POS system before, but she called me a “know-it-all” and said I thought I was better than everyone else. So, when she was having trouble with the discount, I said, “F*** it,” and didn’t help.

[Sister] had figured out another way to specifically discount one item. If she rang it in on its own, she could just discount it and then put all the other orders in so that she could separate the discounted item but keep it one check. That meant she re-rang the entire order and failed to mention to the kitchen that they didn’t need to make the food.

I completely forgot about it after a while, and [Sister] and the server had left. When the food came up and the chef rang the bell and said the server’s name, I realized what had happened.

Me: *To the chef* “[Server] already left. I think they re-rang an order in and never told you not to make it.”

He was rightfully pissed and called [Owner] to explain what had happened so he wouldn’t get in trouble. [Sister] ended up calling the restaurant and saying to the bartender:

Sister: “Is the b**** there?”

Bartender: “Who?”

Sister: “Tell [My Name] I’m going to come there and kick her a**.”

I’d had enough at that point. I called [Owner].

Me: “I’m done. I cannot work with your sister anymore. She’s nasty to all of us.”

I told him about what she’d said on the phone with the bartender.

She was fired. I stayed for maybe another year or so.

This story reminds me of the only person I had to fire for breaching airport security rules. At my old airport, when you first started, you didn’t have an access card; each shift, you had to go to the police station with the coworker you’d be shadowing to pick up a temporary card, which you had to return when finished.

After a probation period, usually two months, you would get your own access card, which you had to carry at all times on a lanyard around your neck. Of course, if for some reason you forgot it at home, we would request an emergency one. Considering the massive bureaucratic pain in the a** for all involved, this rarely happened — usually once per person at most.

Then came [Employee]. She forgot her card at home six times in the first two weeks of the first month of getting her card. She was warned to always bring her card, or if she wanted to, to leave it at the station after each shift so as to not forget it at home.

[Employee] refused that option and continued to forget the card, which was bad enough as the company began to pay fines over it. Then, she claimed to have lost the card, which was a pain to replace.

But the reason why we fired her was the final straw: she had sold her original access card online and was bragging about it on [Social Media site].

How did we find out, you ask?

One of the airport cops was bored during a night shift and was browsing social media when he found the post of her bragging. He called the other cops, and they took a screenshot and went to our offices to call me, as I was also doing night shifts.

There were nighttime calls from me to headquarters and airport operations and then calls from the cops to the judge and prosecutor on call for an arrest warrant.

[Employee] was arrested that night and was fired by sunrise.

Luckily, the package with the card was still at the local mail sorting center, so it was easy to recover. 

Thank God for bored cops. Can you imagine the security nightmare if this had gone unnoticed, and whoever bought the card had breached the secure perimeter?

Now, if you forget the card more than once, you have to always leave it at the station before leaving the airport, and if you claim to lose it, an investigation is started immediately.

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