New employees who probably shouldn't be.

[Bateluer]

I haven't been at my new job long enough to see any new hires compared to me yet, however, there are a few people that are recent hires that stand out. An individual was fired right before I started for wiring the Cat5 of an entire floor with his own color standard, not related to the EIA/TIA standards at all. I got a spend a few days helping redo connectors to repair the damage.

Each floor also has a designated individual that is supposed to be the sole person to submit tickets to the Help Desk, where I work. Apparently, an recent hire, described as a 'whiny bitch' by the female PoC for that floor didn't like her response to one of his issues with a Xerox Workcenter. The unit will randomly lose ethernet connectivity, likely as a result of being as old as I am. According to Xerox, the fix is a ~22k USD upgrade that takes 5 hours to complete and can only be done M-F, from 0900 to 1700. However, a simple 30 second reboot solves the problem for a week. When the complainer was told this, he didn't like it and submitted a ticket over the PoC's head. The ticket was closed with the remarks, 'Reboot printer, per PoC's instructions.' When I spoke to the PoC next, she said he spent the day sulking at his desk.

 

[Bignate603]

Originally posted by: Foxery
-We recently had one request a pay advance after being here <2 weeks.

That's actually understandable. Often when you start a new job you've been out of one for a while and need some extra cash to catch up a bit on bills. I'm not saying that that guy was doing this, but it's possible.

 

[Chaotic42]

There aren't enough bytes on the internet to cover all of my stories and I'm only 26.

McDonald's:

-Once they hired a new girl who after three days couldn't tell the difference in the hamburger and the cheeseburger wraps. She later lost her house and offered herself as a sex servant for anyone who would give her and her kids a place to live.

-They hired a manager who was great at first, but then started acting weird. One time she asked to borrow someone's car to drop off the daily cash deposit. She showed back up three hours later saying that she went to do her taxes. She borrowed my car once and somehow a CD that I couldn't find for more than a year was just sitting in my seat. Later we caught her smoking crack on the clock in the bathroom. I walked out on that one.

Radio:

-We hired a guy who had no experience (not uncommon) for the weekend 12am-6am shift. He had never been on air and had to read a weather forecast at like 4am. He was so nervous that after he finished, he let out a huge sigh and said "Fsck!", not realizing that the mic was on. He threw up and never came back.

-We hired another guy for the same shift who spent one night just looking up porn on the recording computer, allowing the station to just run on auto. That causes a lot of problems, especially when you have dead air for two hours.

Mapping:

-They hired a guy who was like 29 and ended up putting salt in the water cooler because one of his friends was let go.

-They hired a girl who claimed to have tons of experience on her resume, only to find out that she had no idea what she was doing and was causing all kinds of confusion amongst the new-to-the-field employees.

Banking:

-Not a hire, but one guy that I helped interview. He claimed to have 20 years of UNIX experience. My boss had me come up with a UNIX test just to see how familiar people were with the basic commands (ls, cp, chmod, etc.) It turned out that the guy worked in an office where UNIX was used, but he had never used it himself.

 

[nageov3t]

we had one guy a couple years back that I'm pretty sure was mentally challenged.

from a purely superficial standpoint, I can understand how he got the job... he had a solid resume and came across as someone who was really competent, skilled, and who knew what they were doing. any time someone would explain to him how to do things, he'd act all indignant, like my boss does when I reflexively give him orders.

unfortunately, he totally sucked. utterly incompetent in every facet of the job. he couldn't do a single thing right, wouldn't listen when anyone told him what to do, and never asked for help now matter how in over his head he was. he accidentally reformatted our automatic deployment server, ran more bad cables than I can count, and took hours upon hours to do common simple 10-minute tasks.

we thought we could just stick him on overnights as a warm body/reboot monkey, but he even screwed that up... things finally came to a head one night when a super high profile fully managed server went down. this box was down for 5 hours while he was "working" on it... somehow in the course of working on the box, he managed to totally F it. raid was completely gone, and no one knew what he did because he never asked for help or told anyone else that it was down, and we couldn't get a straight answer out of him when we asked wtf happened. client asked for his head and gone he went.

 

[vital]

At one of my last job, one of the supervisor, who was in some pyramid scheme, would bring in her partner to give guest presentations about life/health insurance crap. She even tried to recruit employees by asking them to hang out after work. One of the employees ended up telling a manager but I think they just told her to stop bringing in visitors.

 

[Skyclad1uhm1]

Originally posted by: Chaotic42
-Once they hired a new girl who after three days couldn't tell the difference in the hamburger and the cheeseburger wraps. She later lost her house and offered herself as a sex servant for anyone who would give her and her kids a place to live.

So.. How long did she crash at your place?

We had a programmer (he was actually a failed psychology major, with both parents being psychologists) who, in his first few days, looked at the code and said there was a better solution than had been implemented. He was told the current one was chosen for a reason, and that it wouldn't be changed anytime soon. So he decided to show off his superior knowledge by implementing his solution in the version in SourceSafe. One day later a new build had to be made in order to be in time for the next release. And you guessed it... It would not compile anymore. Of course he didn't own up either, they had to spend hours searching for what was going wrong first.

We also had a girl who joined the Marketing department and saw how one of our employees there was suffering from RSI. She suddenly claimed that she had it too, and that she couldn't move her arms without pain. She stayed away from work a few days, and when she returned talked to some people about how much fun she had had those days waterskiing with her boyfriend.

There have also been people who complained about all the English being used in a Dutch company. Note that our company sells our products world-wide, that all our products are in English, and that we have several offices in other countries, among which the US.

We've had more problems though with some people who acted reasonable at first.

 

[Foxery]

Originally posted by: Bignate603

Originally posted by: Foxery
-We recently had one request a pay advance after being here <2 weeks.

That's actually understandable. Often when you start a new job you've been out of one for a while and need some extra cash to catch up a bit on bills. I'm not saying that that guy was doing this, but it's possible.

Nah, he was hired purely on a commission basis, and requested the advance after completing 2 sales. He's been causing more serious problems lately and may not last long.

Originally posted by: RKS
My wife works at a hospital. They hired a new girl who had some issues with the actual date. The first day she actually made it to work she complained about stomach ulcers. Fearing that they would rupture?, the staff made her go to the ER. ER tested her before admitting her and found a BAC over .20. She was 'held' for the entire day before she was terminated and permitted to drive home.

Thread winner, IMO! :thumbsup:

Originally posted by: Skyclad1uhm1
We also had a girl who joined the Marketing department and saw how one of our employees there was suffering from RSI. She suddenly claimed that she had it too, and that she couldn't move her arms without pain. She stayed away from work a few days, and when she returned talked to some people about how much fun she had had those days waterskiing with her boyfriend.

We had one who constantly schmoozed upper management for pay advances and raises because he supposedly had 8+ children and bills up to his eyeballs, then turned around and bragged to everyone else about buying boats and living it up. We always figured neither one was the truth... proven when his wife was at work the day after supposedly giving birth to twins.

Chronic liars come up with some truly bizarre stories.

 

[clamum]

MOAR

 

[kranky]

Had a new lab technician one time who had experience on his resume, his prior employers checked out. After a couple days of getting settled in, we had him build some cables - 25 conductor cable with RS-232 connectors on each end. He said he had built cables before, so we gave him the tools and the parts and let him get to it. At the end of the first day he had exactly three cables done. That works out to almost 3 minutes per wire! The experienced people do a wire in about 30 seconds when they aren't in a hurry.

Second day we watched him a little. He never stopped moving, but the movements were barely detectible. Imagine watching someone strip the end of a wire and crimp on a pin but slowed down by a factor of 5. I couldn't believe anyone could move that slow over an extended period of time.

Before the third day I pointed out that his production was very much lacking compared to what other people do and asked if there was anything holding him back. His response was to accuse me of hounding him and asked why I hated him.

After the first week I was asked by the project team to assign him to another project since he was burning up all their project budget.

At this point I just started keeping a record of his production on various tasks and our conversations. A couple months went by and I notified HR we would need to relieve this person of duty. They checked my records and said I first needed to do a Skills Improvement Plan for the person - kind of a formal notice that you suck and you better straighten up by the time 6 months goes by, or else.

We talked about mutually acceptable goals, found some, I wrote them on the SIP form, he agreed that what was written was an accurate description of what we had just verbally agreed on. Then he refused to sign it, saying "whenever I sign something, it gets used against me." So I said whether he signs it or not, we're going to use the SIP to measure progress and results. He said that was fine.

A month later we sat down to talk about the continued lack of ability to meet the goals on the SIP, and he agreed he wasn't meeting the goals. I asked when he would start. He said he wasn't sure. I asked if the goals were too challenging. He said no. I asked if he needed anything to be able to meet them. He said no.

I went back to HR with this information and they agreed he had to go. Three months later I was contacted by a federal agency to explain my apparent discrimination. About 6 weeks and $30,000 in legal bills later (the company's lawyer), it was over and done with.

But this guy was an employee for 8 months or so, contributing next to nothing the entire time. I have no idea how his references checked out.

 

[imported_Imp]

There were a bunch at my first job in a nursing home. I only knew a few personally though. The first was a supervisor for kitchen staff that everyone hated. She would always go on and on about her experience, antagonizing her staff, staff in other departments, and once even made one of my supervisors break down with a "panic attack". I wasn't there, but the story goes that she yelled at my supervisor so much that she curled up on the floor in fetal position, and had to have a nurse come down to check on her. Also, she would always unload her 'grunt' work down onto the support assistants while running off to chat people up. A lot of people hated her, and it was common knowledge that she only got the job cause she was very close to the boss. How close, I don't know, nor do I want to; you wouldn't either if you saw her.

Second person is the afforementioned crier. I almost knew she had issues right off the bat. She was really quiet when she first got here, but as time went on, she turned out to be quite different. She was probably the biggest flirt I had ever seen in over 3 years, and the turn over rate for most of the office jobs was pretty high, so that's saying something. There were also the mood swings. This person was in her early 20s so I didn't know what the deal was. One day, she's her 'regular' flirt/happy self, the next day she'll gve you a cold stare, look pissed and lock the door to her office. Then there's the productivity thing: she got shit done. She was always coming in on days ,when she wasn't scheduled, to finish stuff that the other people currently and previously in her position (part-time) kept up with. This probably had something to do with the fact that she went off on half an hour long "breaks" about 5 times a day, walking around the building, nowhere to be found. Most of the supervisors and some of my coworkers actually really disliked her. She definately had issues though cause I kept in touch after she quit, and she even got fired from her next job for not fitting in after a one month probationary period. Guess that happens when you get into arguements with everyone and have a know-it-all attitude.

Edit: Must learn to proof read before posting.

 

[AreaCode7O7]

New contractor repeatedly showed up late for two weeks and then finally didn't come in at all, calling to abruptly resign with no notice. Oh well, we figured. Clean out her inbox and start interviewing again.

Then my peer got a call from a manager on another team, indignantly asking why we were answering this person's email.
"Because she was contracting with us and quit."
"What? She just started full time on our team. She was contracting here already? We would have rearranged the start dates if we'd known!"

So she lied to us and she lied to the interview team, screwed us over and avoided the interview team asking us about her performance.

Since she'd never formally told me, the person responsible for her accounts, anything other than "I quit" (and because her existing permissions gave her lots of access to sensitive data she shouldn't have), I followed procedure to the letter - and terminated all her accounts right on time.

She called me FUMING - "I know you shut off my accounts, the Help Desk told me you did!"
"Hm? Of course I did - you quit."
"You knew I was still here! I told <peer name>!"
"Gee, I hadn't heard. Guess you'd better request new accounts - you know, it can take up to a week and a half for them to come through."

The funny thing is, her badge was automatically shut off already and she got stuck in the parking garage; you would think she could have taken the hint.

 

[Jeff7]

Originally posted by: Chaotic42
-They hired a manager who was great at first, but then started acting weird. One time she asked to borrow someone's car to drop off the daily cash deposit. She showed back up three hours later saying that she went to do her taxes. She borrowed my car once and somehow a CD that I couldn't find for more than a year was just sitting in my seat. Later we caught her smoking crack on the clock in the bathroom. I walked out on that one.

You let her borrow your car???
How much is your car worth, $15?