So I hired a guy, let’s call him Jim, to work for me as a Tax Consultant.
Jim was very unhealthy, overweight, diabetic and a prostate cancer survivor (he let everyone know that). He was about 5’10” but weighed 280lbs.
Jim had 20+ years of sales experience on the phone. That, in my experience, can be both a good thing and a very bad thing.
Why bad?
Some people get stuck in their ways and won’t change.
Jim sounded great on the phone, there was no denying that. The position was a consultative sales role. We weren’t selling pens or trinkets. We would diagnose a person’s problem with the IRS to see IF our company could help them before we’d offer service.
Not everyone would qualify for our services… so it was of the utmost importance that people were properly qualified.
Even though Jim went through extensive training, this didn’t quite sit well with him.
One thing I strongly believe in is monitoring calls. From receptionist to sales to customer service to AR and everywhere in between.
From the moment Jim got on the phones I was having trouble with him. I’m a firm believer in scripting and I’m a firm believer in letting people know both what they are doing right and wrong the moment they are doing it.
I gave Jim a bunch of old leads to call to get him warmed up and used to his new role. We practiced his script, got him set up and running and away he went.
Jim instantly got a couple of deals, which was great… But the way he got them wasn’t.
Jim wasn’t the only new hire, so I had to manage my time between them. It came time for me to monitor Jim again, then I heard him say:
“Yeah, my boss is breaking my balls here and said I’ve got to get another deal in by the end of the day or he’s sending me home… Alright then, if you call back and I’m not here, it’s because he canned me… That is if the IRS doesn’t throw you in jail first.”
This went against everything our company represented and everything I trained him on.
One of my other consultants, Rick, was freaking out about Jim too.
I had a conversation with Jim and gave him a couple hours of additional training and I thought we were all set.
A couple of weeks went by and Jim seemed to be improving… then it happened.
I was monitoring one of our Document Collectors and she called one of Jim’s clients, who he ran payment on, to get some necessary paperwork in.
The client was livid and started yelling at her that no payment was to be ran and that he had to wait for payday and so on.
All of my Document Collectors were top notch, Jan was no exception. She transferred the call over to Jim. I instantly started listening to Jim.
(Just so you know, the ONLY person who could have pushed the payment through was Jim… He had to physically get up and put it into the box to have the payment run.)
Jim started off by apologizing to the client on the phone… Good….
Then he said it… The sentence that got him fired as soon as he clicked off of the phone.
“Yeah, that girl is dumb and she shouldn’t have run the payment… I’ll make sure she gets fired over this… You know how black people are, you can’t entrust them to do anything right…”
I have ZERO tolerance for racism…. I have ZERO tolerance for blatant lying… I have ZERO tolerance for people who don’t take responsibility for their actions.
I yelled across the sales floor for Jim to get to the conference room. I guess I yelled kind of loudly and sounded pretty angry because the sales floor went silent.
I grabbed Jim’s team leader and told him to clean out Jim’s desk and I’d explain the situation to him later. BTW, Jim’s team leader happened to be black too.
I called HR and told our HR girl to cut a check for him, I called one of the owners and told him to sign the check and bring it to me.
Well, the owners at the company had no balls, so they sent the 95lb HR girl to come and help terminate Jim.
This was in California, so when we terminated anyone we NEVER gave them a reason why, because we didn’t want to open ourselves up to a lawsuit.
Jim had been sitting in the conference room for maybe 10 minutes before I came in with the HR girl… I was mad so I said in my typical fashion…
“Jim I brought you in here today to let you know you’re fired… Here’s your final check, your personal possessions are being collected from your desk right now, I’m going to get those and I’ll be right back.”
Just as I left the conference room Jim started throwing chairs…The HR girl came running behind me scared out of her mind.
Jim’s team leader was supposed to have had Jim’s desk cleaned out, but was still working on it. I snappeed and said
Me: “Where in the hell is his personal shit? We need to get this guy out of here now.”
Team Leader: “Brian, I’ve already got 2 boxes of stuff… But he all of this left and he has 4 Costco-sized boxes of Twinkies in his desk…”
I about busted over laughing… I try to find the comedy in every situation. Who keeps 4 Costco-sized boxes of Twinkies in their desk? Especially if they’re an insulin dependent diabetic?
Then here came one of the other owners with the representative from the EDD… (We were getting inspected by California’s Employment Development Department to make sure we had an adequate working environment for our employees… This stemmed from a complaint from a disgruntled former employee. The owners forgot to mention this to me.)
Jim was yelling and screaming through the office, bulling his way down the hall.. He almost knocked down the lady EDD inspector…He was screaming that we were bad horrible people for firing a cancer survivor and blah blah blah…
I don’t care if people are racist, they have the right to be… But I don’t have to tolerate them and I won’t allow racist behavior in anyplace I work.
We finally got him out of the office. It took 4 boxes (the ones that paper come in) to get all of his personal effects…
He proceeded to yell and scream in front of our office for 10-15 minutes before he left. He had to make 4 trips from his car to the office for his personal effects too.
I guess the moral of the story is… If you’re a racist douche bag, don’t bring in 4 boxes of crap to your desk when you’ve only been at a company for 2 weeks.
The names have been changed, but the events an location have not.
