CONTENT WARNING: Sexual Assault Of Minor (Prior to events of story)

I used to work at a thrift store, and we got a new employee, [Creeper]. He was hired to be a truck driver to go around doing furniture pick-ups.

[Creeper] seemed to be a good-natured kind of guy. He tried to be friendly. The problem was that he was a little too aggressive about it — too friendly and too eager to make friends, particularly toward the younger female employees.

[Gay Employee] rode with [Creeper] once and made it absolutely clear that he would never get in the truck with [Creeper] ever again. Apparently, [Creeper] had views that were not LGBTQ-friendly, and [Gay Employee] didn’t feel comfortable or safe listening to the Bible-quote-laced diatribes [Creeper] would go on.

[Tough-Looking Employee] ended up with that job, and even he utterly loathed [Creeper] within a single trip. According to [Tough-Looking Employee], [Creeper] would talk with customers for upwards of twenty minutes at a time, aggressively pushing an invitation for them to join [Creeper]’s Bible study group. [Creeper] would then completely empty the truck, rearrange furniture, then go to the next house, Bible study invite, empty the truck, rearrange the entire truck for the newest furniture, and move on. [Tough-Looking Employee] said it was a study in pure frustration to try to get [Creeper] to knock that off, to no avail.

Finally, [Creeper] and [New Guy] left for a pick-up. They only had three houses to go to, so due to our need for coverage, both were scheduled to do a Donation Door shift in the afternoon. This was under the belief that an hour per pick-up was perfectly reasonable, plus some travel buffer time, seeing as how each pick-up was within the city limits. They turned three houses into a seven-hour trip for a few couches, chairs, and/or tables per house. 

They missed their door shifts completely, and [Assistant Manager] was forced to beg a couple of staff members to do an extra door shift to cover. Now, for [Assistant Manager], most staff would grab a pickaxe, give it a twirl, and ask which mountain she would like moved and to where. While a second door shift wasn’t something any of us liked, we would gladly do it for her. However, the point was that she never should have had to ask to cover [Creeper]’s lollygagging. ([New Guy] was clear; he wasn’t the driver, and short of bashing [Creeper] over the head and taking command of a large vehicle that he was unfamiliar with, he couldn’t do a whole lot to kick [Creeper] into gear.)

They both showed up near the end of the day, and [Supervisor #1] got into it a bit with [Creeper], basically calling him out on taking seven hours to hit three houses for a small load of stuff. He went into a moaning fit full of excuses. [Supervisor #1] told him that his goofing off was completely unacceptable before coming upstairs. She was almost to the top when both she and I (my area of sorting was near the stairwell) heard a very loud crash. [Creeper] had thrown something or knocked something over in a fit of pique. [Supervisor #1] did not go back down to investigate.

[Supervisor #1] went to [Supervisor #2] and talked to her about [Creeper]’s temper, as [Creeper] left yet again for a late lunch. On a lark, [Supervisor #1] and [Supervisor #2] went to public records and did some snooping to see if [Creeper] had any prior arrests.

Answer: Yes. He had been convicted of the rape of a fourteen-year-old girl and spent ten years in prison. He had gotten out of jail three months before his hiring.

[Supervisor #1] and [Supervisor #2] printed the information they found. [Supervisor #1] compiled the papers as evidence to give to [Store Manager] the next day. [Supervisor #2] grabbed me and told me what they had found, and I obligingly wiped the browser’s search history for them — literally minutes before [Creeper] came back from his break.

All was played cool as [Creeper] finished out his day and left. Staff were called and interviewed, and we learned all about what [Creeper] had done to make female employees uncomfortable.

He hit on me but claimed to be “a nice guy” in an incel way — describing how he was a follower of Christ and God had decreed that he deserved a good woman to be his devoted wife. (I was in my mid-thirties, but I have a baby face that makes me look like I’m in my twenties. [Creeper] was in his fifties.) I wasn’t afraid of him even before the horrible revelation, but I was sarcastically, cynically, uninterested. Unconsciously defensive behavior, I guess?

He hit on a female employee who had turned old enough to drink alcohol only a few months before. She was all kinds of “nope” about hanging out with him, too.

He even hit on one of our youngest newbies who had literally walked the stage out of high school two weeks before. She was also all kinds of “nope”.

Even the older women were very uncomfortable around him.

Anyway, the story has not yet come to an end. We’re still on the same day of the revelation that he was a convicted pedophile. We kept asking one another why [Store Manager] hadn’t done a background check!

[Creeper]’s shift ended at 4:30.

[Supervisor #2] left at 5:30.

At 6:00 pm, [Supervisor #2] called back. I picked up the phone, and [Supervisor #2] was highly anxious. She said that she had seen what looked like [Creeper], who should have left already, still in the parking lot. He was just sitting in his car for hours, staring at the building. She was deeply concerned for [Supervisor #1] and me, as we were closing the store together. Note: she did not approach [Creeper] in any way; she just left like she wasn’t paying attention and then drove home to call us and give us the heads-up. She had already called [Tough-Looking Employee]’s cell phone and asked him to stay with us all until we left the premises. His shift ended a bit before ours, but he willingly agreed to stay with us to keep us safe. ([Tough-Looking Employee] was the real MVP right there.)

At 6:15, I asked [Tough-Looking Employee] if he would go out and “look for carts” in the parking lot and just have a look-see to see if [Creeper] was still out there. [Tough-Looking Employee] caught on immediately and went outside. He came back five minutes later to state that, yes, there was a vehicle with someone in it who looked a lot like [Creeper] just loitering in the parking lot. [Tough-Looking Employee] told me that he looked at the person with the kind of “I see you, I’m aware of you, points-to-eyes-points-to-other-person” look before coming back inside.

At 6:30, [Tough-Looking Employee] went back outside to check again for “carts” and reported that the vehicle with person-who-looks-like-[Creeper] had moved on and we were in the clear.

The store shut down as usual. [Tough-Looking Employee] went out the back door first, looked around, and reported that we were still clear. We all headed for our vehicles, climbed in, locked doors, and waited for each other to pull out of the parking spots. Nobody left until we were in a conga line heading for the exit to separate.

The next day, more details came out. Apparently, [Store Manager] did interviews, but it was [Regional Manager]’s task to do background checks as the final step before hiring, which they didn’t see fit to do. 

[Store Manager] lost her s*** at [Regional Manager]; due to their negligence, this was a storm of truly epic lawsuit-and-PR-Nightmare-Fuel-worthy proportions, and the wheels were promptly turned to getting [Creeper] outta dodge. Not only was he creeping on female staff, but he was representing the company while pushing “Bible Study” on customers, going into their houses, and interacting with their families. Oh, yeah, and he was a convicted pedophile.

Thankfully, [Creeper] was let go as “Not A Good Fit For The Company”, using his tiff with [Supervisor #1] as one reason and his lollygagging on pick-ups as the second reason. We were very alert after hours for a while. Thankfully, he never appeared again after being let go.

We didn’t know or think of it then, but in all honesty, we should have called the police while he was sitting in the parking lot. His behaviors were deeply concerning, and the fact that he had been recently released from prison and was now lurking outside our workplace long after hours should have garnered a lot of attention. 

Live and learn.

I never had any leadership training, so I will not claim that my conduct in this story was in any way perfect. I did what felt correct at the time.

I was working as supervisor of our production area. We’re a company for document management, so people’s main tasks were to take documents out of folders, remove staples, form neat piles of paper for the scanner feeding trays, and stuff like that.

During that particular time, we had one job that required more complicated prep. I don’t remember the details (this was ten years ago), but it involved sorting the documents by various criteria and thus was more demanding and time-consuming. The task could probably have been done more efficiently, but the CEO of the company himself had decreed how that particular job was to be done, and thus, we pretty much had no choice.

We had put one specific coworker on that task, and he was clearly unhappy with it; he was muttering complaints under his breath, and his head grew redder and redder. Then, when I happened to pass his workplace, he called out to me:

Coworker: “Who decided to do this task in this stupid way?”

I was in the middle of three different things, so I was admittedly somewhat curt when I replied over my shoulder.

Me: “[CEO] told us to do it that way.”

Then, suddenly, [Coworker] sprang up, got in my way, shoved my chest, and shouted:

Coworker: “That’s not how you talk to me! Don’t talk to me like that!”

I am male, but I’m neither big nor strong; [Coworker] was a head bigger and had at least 30 kg (about 66 pounds) on me. Even if I had wanted to fight him, I would have stood no chance. So, my only option was to remain calm.

Me: “[Coworker], please sit back down and continue your work.”

He kept shoving me.

Coworker: “I’m not doing that! What are you going to do? Huh? Huh?”

This went on for what felt like a long time but was probably just a minute or two. Then, another coworker got up and tried to get in between us and de-escalate. At this point, I got scared, because [Coworker #2] was pregnant at that time, and who knew what would happen if [Coworker] actually took a swing and hit her instead of me?

Me: “[Coworker], I can’t work with you like that. I want you to go home for today.”

Coworker: “I’m not going! You can’t send me home!”

Me: “All right, if you won’t take it from me, I’ll let [Boss] tell you.”

I walked over to my desk and called [Boss], who was the branch manager for our location. I told her that [Coworker] had attacked me and I would like to send him home for the day. She told me to send him over to her office. To my surprise, he did go there without any complaints.

About half an hour later, he returned, sat down at his desk, and continued work without any words.

[Boss] then called me over to tell her my side of the story. I gave an account of what had happened and told her that I really thought he should go home for the day because I didn’t know what he would do.

Boss: “Yeah, when he got over here, he told me that if you said another word to him, he would hit you in the face. I can’t send him home; that’s what he wants. But I will write him up.” 

I was flabbergasted. [Coworker] had outright told her he was seconds away from hitting me, and she had sent him back to me? Also, if all he wanted was to go home, he would have gone the moment I tried to send him home; that reasoning was bulls***. Unfortunately, I was too timid to be assertive at that time in my life, so I just accepted it and went back to work, trying to avoid [Coworker] for the rest of the day.

The next morning, I was called into [Boss]’s office. [Coworker] was already there, and [Boss] told me that he wanted to apologize. [Coworker] mumbled some stuff about both of us being men, and that’s how we behave, after all. (Note: that’s not an apology.) I asked what guarantees I had that something like that wouldn’t happen again, and he told me, “This will never happen again.”

The way [Boss] sniffed at my question clearly told me she thought I was the unreasonable one for not just accepting the non-apology. It was obvious that I wouldn’t get anything else out of either of them, so I just accepted it and went on with my day.

I later learned that while [Boss] did give [Coworker] a write-up, she did not hand it to Human Resources, thus not making it official — deliberately so, as she did not want it to reflect badly on her leadership.

Unfortunately, this is not where this story ends.

A few months went by. I tried to avoid any confrontations and let [Boss] handle [Coworker]’s assignments as much as possible.

[Boss] then decided she wanted [Coworker] to learn one of our more complicated data entry jobs. It would fall to our head of data entry (DE) to teach him said job. [Head of DE] already had some misgivings about him; they both came from the same Eastern European country, and he reminded her of gang members she had known there. But she needed the help and so agreed to teach him.

I only know what followed second-hand, as I was not present. [Boss] and [Head of DE] called [Coworker] into the data entry room to start teaching him. However, he had none of it. He shoved [Head of DE] away from him, shouting:

Coworker: “No! You’re not teaching me! I want [My Name] to teach me!”

By all accounts, [Boss] went white as a sheet when that happened.

[Boss] later called me into her office (I had heard about the incident by that time) and told me that I would not have to teach [Coworker]. In fact, he was on a limited contract that would run out in about six weeks. She would just not renew his contract, and then he would be gone.

Obviously, no one, especially not [Head of DE], was happy to hear that they would have to work with this guy for another six weeks, but unfortunately, that’s what we ended up doing. Since [Boss] hadn’t filed his attack on me officially, I suspect she didn’t even have the legal handle to fire him directly.

I did get a small comeuppance, however. About two weeks before [Coworker]’s contract ran out, he came to me and asked whether I had already scheduled time to teach him that data entry job. I told him in no uncertain terms that I would not and would never train him in that job. I would not reward him for the way he had treated [Head of DE]. I was not willing to take time out of my schedule at his whim. If he had wanted to learn that job, [Head of DE] would have been the person to ask, but he had squandered that chance.

He left without another word after that.

It’s Valentine’s Day, and I’m eating dinner at a steakhouse. The waitress brings around a bunch of pink carnations and hands one out to each female diner. 

The man at the next table says something I can’t make out. His date replies: 

Woman: “No. You still have to. This flower isn’t from you; it’s from [Steakhouse]!”

I live in a rural area, and while I’ve never had my mailbox smashed, I did have a very lazy postal worker. I’m 99.9% positive she’d open our Netflix DVDs and watch them before we got them back when we first moved in. She’d bend people’s mailboxes back so she could more easily put in the mail from her car, but it would also let rain get in.

A few years ago, someone stole our mailbox. It was one of those plastic Rubbermaid ones,  and they pried it up and made off with it, leaving nails just sticking up from the base. For the new mailbox, we put rebar a good foot or so into the ground and whatever else my husband did. The end result was it gave the mailbox a nice recoil.

The postal worker tried bending back our mailbox, and it bounced right back — WHAMMO! — right into her car. She tried complaining, but our box was totally compliant with PO standards.

No more soaking wet mail.

Once at work, a jerk customer hid the ground beef they’d picked up in the diaper aisle of all places. It was almost literally as far away from the meat department as you could get, on the opposite side of the store, and it was stuffed all the way onto the back of the shelf.

Even worse? There was a freaking bite taken out of it!

I can’t even begin to think why someone would do either of those two things.