We Don’t Usually Say This, But… Maybe This Guy Should Be Fired

This was some time ago, maybe around the year 2000. The place I worked at was a warehouse — nothing special. I had to get orders to pull, help with some customers in the showroom, help with shipping/receiving, and so on. My coworkers, on the other hand, were all pretty special in their own ways. One of them really sticks out in my memory.

[Coworker] was very smart, but it was just book smarts; he had no common sense whatsoever. Our supervisor best described him as such: “You could ask him what time it is, and he’d tell you how a watch works.”

One day, I got to work and [Coworker] didn’t come in. After a couple of days of not being at work, he finally showed up, but he had to utilize his bike and the public buses to get from where he lived (about fifteen miles away) to work. I didn’t really care about his reasoning for being out a few days and riding his bike now instead of driving, but he wanted to freely share his experience with everyone at work.

He liked to visit a local bar by his residence — roughly a two-block distance. He usually parked by the bar, had a few beers, and drove home. He was leaving the bar on Friday, and he’d had a few drinks — nothing out of the norm. As he was walking to his truck, he spotted an unmarked police cruiser nearby. He approached their car and started telling the cops in that they couldn’t be parked there and all sorts of other things I can’t recall. He told us that after he told them he lived nearby, the cops told him to just walk home and cool off. They told him to walk home and come back in the morning to get his truck. He mouthed off to them some more, and instead of listening to them, he approached his truck. They arrested him for DUI. He was held over the weekend until he was arraigned on Monday. Then, he had his license revoked, he had to get a lawyer, and so on.

Now that [Coworker] couldn’t legally drive until he could get his license back, he was using the city bus system and his pedal bike to get to and from work. As smart as the guy was, he really was pretty dumb.

One morning, I got to work and it was just pouring rain outside. The downpour didn’t deter [Coworker] from coming in. He still biked to the closest bus stop, put his bike on the front rack of the bus, got off at a bus stop about a mile from work, and biked the rest of the way. When he got to work, he was dripping wet, soaked to the bone.

He reassured us that he had dry clothes to change into in his backpack, which he had wrapped in plastic to keep it from getting wet. It sounded like he’d thought of everything. Off to the restroom he went to change.

A couple of minutes later, out came [Coworker], and he was in his speedo-looking underwear and a dry shirt — nothing else on, just his underwear and shirt. He proceeded to tell us that he’d forgotten to pack socks and pants, so he had to wait for his wet stuff to dry off more before he could put it back on. He then proceeded to walk around the warehouse without pants on and try to work!

The warehouse manager made him go put on his wet pants and told him he just had to deal with them being wet and that he couldn’t parade around the workplace in his underwear.