CONTENT WARNING: Sexual Assault, Violence (Carjacking, Stabbing)

I’m seventeen, and I’m being given a tour of the new workplace by my boss. One of the guys sees me and says:

Employee: “Oh! The new guy! I hope he doesn’t end up like the last guy!”

At first, I think it’s normal workplace banter, but as I go around, I am constantly told, “I hope you don’t end up like the last guy!”, so I have to ask my trainer what gives.

Trainer: “The last guy we hired for your position never did what he was told and always mouthed off, so he eventually got fired. Then, about three weeks later, he groped a random lady in a nearby park, ran to the store to steal a car, and tried to carjack a customer, who stabbed him a few times. Then, he ran all the way back here and locked himself in our employee restroom to hide from the police, like he thought we were going to protect him or something.”

I laughingly assure him that I have no intention of doing any of that.

Trainer: “Yeah, there was something oddly talented about his level of stupid; it was like he was trying to find the stupidest of all the bad choices. He succeeded spectacularly.”

I was a manager at a fast food place for a while. You’d think my worst employee would have been some teenager who slacked off or didn’t listen.

Mind you, I’m only twenty. I was a manager from nineteen to twenty-one. This new employee did not like that I — a child, as she put it — was above her. She would constantly undermine my authority. And I wasn’t a micromanager, and I didn’t even get loud. My way was, “Hey, d’you want to check on the lobby?” Not demanding but asking nicely. That’s how I was trained by my manager.

I would get, “No, I don’t,” instead of, “Nah, but sure.” So, I started saying, “I spotted a few dirty tables. Could you take care of it?”

Eventually, I appealed to the owners to have a talk with [Employee] and me privately about her attitude and unwillingness to accept me as her manager. In the talk, [Employee] made it very clear that she would not ever accept a teenager (keyword) as her superior. I was twenty, but I do look younger.

When we explained I was well out of high school, her attitude flipped. Suddenly, she was like, “Oh! So, you are an adult. That’s okay, then.”

We still let her go for her blatant disregard for authority. That and she was a lazy s***, anyway.

I am a relatively new employee at a large natural history museum. I give tours to visiting schools. One thing I learned a long time ago is that the kids are usually all great; it’s the parents that you have to watch out for.

During my induction, I am shown a whiteboard in the staff common area. It has a list of odd quotes and descriptions of weird people. I am told that this is a monthly list of all the memorable guest encounters in the museum, with a poll taken at the end of the month about who had the best (or worst) encounter, with a fun little prize. It’s a great way to keep morale high when the guests are at their worst.

I am explaining plate tectonics to a class as they assemble around our giant model of the Earth — a spinning globe showing all the major fault lines.

Parent: “If the Earth is a globe, then how come all the rivers don’t just flow to the bottom?!”

Me: “First of all, there is no if; the Earth is a globe. Secondly, what do you mean by ‘the bottom’? The bottom of what?”

Parent: “Like, the bottom! If the Earth is a ball, then it has a top and bottom, right?”

Me: “We have poles to indicate the axis the Earth spins on, but that’s the only way we’d define an arbitrary top or bottom of the Earth. And the gravity on the surface is what keeps rivers flowing how they do.”

Parent: “Huh… sounds like something an indoctrinated ‘glober’ would say. River flow can be explained so much easier if you account for a flat earth.”

Me: “That’s absolutely not true in even the slightest. Please don’t make such comments around the children, sir, in case they mistake what you’re saying as fact and not nonsense.”

Parent: “You can’t say that to me! I’m a customer!”

Me: “You are a guest, in a place of science and fact. Ask questions about the facts to learn, but do not question the facts themselves. Now, may I continue my tour, or will you keep interrupting?”

The parent remained blissfully silent and sullen for the rest of the tour. 

At the end of the day, I went over to the whiteboard and wrote down “flat-earther” as my craziest encounter. The sad part? I didn’t even win that month.

I was working for a temp agency in the 1990s, and they sent me to a “business center”. It was a small mall in the 1980s and had now been turned into four or five businesses in the same space, sharing the general facilities — lunch room, copy machines, etc. I was brought on as a tech as these businesses really weren’t big enough to have their own IT departments. I was told that the previous guy in the position, “Joe”, had left for a more stable job, and everyone in the place was sorry to see him go.

The first week I was there, I started finding problems with the guy. I came into one place and was told a computer was acting up. The business owner looked like she was about to burst into tears.

Owner: “When the last computer did this, Joe said it was broken and I had to get a new computer.”

I fixed the problem in five minutes with a free antivirus program and set up the rest of the computers in that office, as well.

Me: “What did Joe do with the old computer?”

Owner: “Oh, he took it home for parts since it wouldn’t work anymore.”

And all that week, I kept running into things that were really simple fixes, but good ol’ Joe had either taken all frickin’ day fixing them or announced that the machine was borked and had to be replaced. And Joe was apparently the designated recycler.

One owner said Joe was always in the office, working on the system; he’d be all day working on that computer. It turned out that before he’d left, he’d tried really hard to convince the owner to turn that tower over to Joe, and Joe would replace it “for free”. But the owner decided not to do that; he told me he just didn’t trust Joe all that much.

After taking a look at the computer, I could see why Joe wanted to take it with him; it was full of adult material grabbed from the Internet. After I showed this to the owner, Joe became persona non grata at that place.

It gets better.

It turned out that Joe couldn’t hack it in the real world and ended up going back to the temp agency. He asked for his old job back, but no, I had that position. So, he came to the facility and tried to bug me into quitting. I reported him to the agency, and he was written up and told not to return to the facility for any reason.

And when he did return to the facility, I informed building management, who called the police. Upon seeing the po-po, Joe took off like a cheetah, trying to exit the building through the back door — but failing because it now had a lock on it due to a break-in a few months previous.

After he tried (and failed) to resist arrest, the cops called in a request for his records and found out that Joe was wanted for suspicion of dealing. I had been talking to the cops at the time, and upon hearing this, I had my own suspicions. I went to check that computer that Joe had spent so much time on.

Sure enough, hidden in the files was a partial record of Joe’s activities back when he’d worked there. I printed out the file, handed it to the cops, and told them I’d send them anything else I found on the computer.

The next day, the feds showed up and took the computer. Joe went to prison for five years.

I was the plant manager for a manufacturing plant with close to 500 people on the floor. The workforce was stable, but we had the usual openings in the summer for temps or students when the full-time guys wanted time off.

We hired a young kid full-time, the son of a friend of the machine shop foreman. I was encouraging the foremen and supervisors to use the three-month evaluation process to good effect. It’s not that you can’t get rid of people after that; it just makes it easier if you manage it upfront.

Every time I asked how [New Kid] was doing, the answer was, “Great.” Then, one day while I was making my rounds, one of the millwrights asked to speak to me. Sure, no problem. It was about [New Kid].

The millwright, an English tradesman with impeccable trade skills and credentials, had seen [New Kid] struggling with something and asked if he could use some advice. [New Kid] answered:

New Kid: “Why don’t you f*** off and mind your own f****** business?”

He was called into my office for that one, along with the foreman. I explained that [New Kid] had a unique opportunity to work his way into a full apprenticeship as a precision CNC machinist if that’s what he wanted to do, but his attitude needed to change.

That was about two months in. We had a meeting every week after that, and reports of bad behavior and belligerence kept coming in. The last one was from the person who operated the yard crane and the big forklifts; [New Kid] explained to him that he didn’t know how to do his job.

That was it — a week to go and he was out the door. The foreman reported back that the family believed we did this sort of thing deliberately — take young, innocent people, work them hard for three months, and then let them go so we didn’t have to pay severance.

Sigh. I always wondered how people like that end up.