The Steampunk World
The Hooterhumper* got fired today.
For two years, this guy had scammed our company out of thousands. He was hired to set appointments for his partner the salesman, basically arranging meetings between interested parties and our high-level sales reps (the cheapest thing my employer sells costs $250k, so this ain't door-to-door stuff). Hooterhumper was in cahoots with the sales sleaze, who was of the shmooze variety, which is actually a rarity in our sales department. The Hooterhumper would claim to have set a meeting (usually somewhere with a beach), and the sales sleaze would go there, chill for a few days, and come back raving about the potential deal. After about nine months, the sales sleaze was fired for not selling anything, but no investigation was made into what he was doing all this time, so the Hooterhumper wasn't fired as well.
All this time, he was being paid a salary plus hundreds of dollars a month in bonus whenever he arranged a certain number of meetings. He would simply tell his boss- my boss- how many he had set, and that's what she would pay him on. Why didn't she verify that these meetings were taking place? Simple- she invited exaggeration of results, so that she could report good numbers to the owner/president with a clear conscience. You lie to me, so I don't have to lie to my boss- I'll simply be reporting what I was told.
After the sales sleaze was fired, he was hooked up with another type of salesperson- the go-getter. This woman would take a meeting with anybody, anywhere, on the long shot that it would lead somewhere. So in the first case the company was flying the sleaze around the country to get a tan, and in the second case, they were flying the go-getter to meet with people who couldn't possibly buy our product, but might be able to introduce us to someone who could. Arguably a valid sales tactic, but the Hooterhumper's job was to court higher-ups, not call peons with a lot of free time and act as secretary. The go-getter could do that herself.
Eventually the owners whose money was at stake started to get sick of flying people around and demanded some sort of validity from these meetings. The Hooterhumper's numbers took a plunge. However, he soon developed a new scam- he would call a higher-up at a prospect's company, claiming to be a higher-up at another company, and ask them which company he should choose as his X provider, just looking for some advice, and by the way have you heard of Y company which I have heard a lot of good things about? Then he'd call back the next week and ask for the meeting.
He told our boss about it. Brilliant, she said, keep it up and maybe you'll return to those fantastic levels of performance you had before the auditing system was put into place. Never mind that a single pissed-off V.P. could absolutely tank our company by spreading the word about our unscrupulous tactics. Megacorporations have many ways of hiding their inappropriate behavior, but if you're one of a handful of companies in a field and word gets around you're a scam, you can sink fast. It's like they say, if there's two barbers in town, go to the one with the bad haircut.
This tactic combined with the go-getter allowed him to perform moderately and avoid the axe for the rest of the two years. Meanwhile, my job was running the database where, among other things, the calls he made were logged as history against the prospect's file. Knowing that he was pulling a fast one with the go-getter, I presented evidence to my boss that he was claiming credit for meetings he had not set. If the company had plants in the same town, for example, he'd claim two meetings even though the go-getter met with only one person- the person who had jurisdiction over those two locations. In one case he'd called a company, reached the higher-up, introduced our company, and convinced the person that they needed to meet with the go-getter- all in 36 seconds! Funny, it was taking the other meeting-setters weeks or months to build a rapport, send them some case studies, the usual complex-sales stuff. My boss took the evidence and put it in his personell file- after all, he was skewing upwards the results of her department! Why should she fire him even though it's all a ruse? What's that you say, for the good of the company? This is a Marketing Manager we're talking about.
What bothered me about the Hooterhumper was not that he was scamming the company (I covered my ass by reporting the scam to my superiors, but I didn't particularly care), but rather his vast sense of entitlement. This is something The Roommate possessed that is usually only found in rich kids who've never worked a day of honest work. The Hooterhumper's position on the issue was that hey, if the company wasn't going to pay him to do nothing, they were forcing him to do as little as possible to still get paid, and he was the victim because of it. This extended into everything he did- his weekly affairs, his frequent overlooked absence, and his failure to change our process to benefit him further- if he got caught/docked/denied, it was because people were keeping him down, out to get him, treating him unfairly. One time he threw food at a coworker until the guy snapped and was ready to throw down (I broke that one up, pissing off two other guys who claimed I was violating an unwritten rule of manhood by stopping a fight). The Hooterhumper's take on the issue was that he shouldn't be forced to work with someone so annoying, it was the other guy's fault, he practically forced him to pick on the guy.
Another example: At one point I took over managing the department for a month. Attendance was at 50%, meaning these salaried people were getting paid full time to show up half-time (no doubt that average was dragged down by you-know-who). So I implemented a strict procedure to deal with attendance issues. Soon enough, I got a call from the Hooterhumper- he had to take his girlfriend to the airport. Sure, no problem, I said, I'll just mark you down as absent. HH wanted to be excused because- a classic line- "If I'd have lied and said I was sick, I would be excused. So by punishing me, you're punishing my honesty." Sigh. This is why I'm not in management.
So what finally dinged him? Well, I was surprised. I thought somebody would finally look at what we've paid this guy and what we'd got out of it and remedy a long-standing mistake. But it turns out he had another scam going. He had gotten ahold of one of our corporate parking passes and duplicated it, and had been parking with it for over a year. Obviously if this was a large company with a special lot for those who have a pass, that never would have worked. They'd notice his junker among the jaguars, so to speak. But we just have a contract with a nearby public lot, and paid $12 per day per car to park there. Someone did an audit, and whattaya know, lookie here, out goes the Hooterhumper.
He was, of course, incensed. The company was being petty to fire him over such a minor thing, he said. It wasn't costing the company anything, he said (heh- you can do the math on that one, $12 a day times 52 weeks of 5 days, not to mention any legal action the parking lot might take for duping one of their passes). He might even take legal action unless somehow he realizes that he scammed the company out of a good $80,000 over the years and he should just cut his losses and find another sucker.
But there's that sense of entitlement that fuels the litigiousness of American culture. Corporations have it- 'your product makes our product obsolete so we will sue you and if we lose the government owes us a bailout'- and rich brats have it, too. My college experience was filled to the brim with these types. What causes it? Pushover parenting? Lack of hardship? It seems to show up in greater numbers among the younger generation, but I can't tell if that's because we have less hardship in our lives or we've just had less time to experience it. Who knows?
When I was a supervisor at my old job, I told everybody the same thing. (Young) people would make all kinds of crazy requests: "Can I go home? I'm tired." or "my show is on" or "I miss my boyfriend" or "I'm sick of work." I'd tell them, "Absolutely! Go right ahead! Just drop off your employee I.D. at the front desk! The HR Manager will call you to arrange an exit interview." "No, no, I want to keep my job!" "Well, then, do your job."
For two years, this guy had scammed our company out of thousands. He was hired to set appointments for his partner the salesman, basically arranging meetings between interested parties and our high-level sales reps (the cheapest thing my employer sells costs $250k, so this ain't door-to-door stuff). Hooterhumper was in cahoots with the sales sleaze, who was of the shmooze variety, which is actually a rarity in our sales department. The Hooterhumper would claim to have set a meeting (usually somewhere with a beach), and the sales sleaze would go there, chill for a few days, and come back raving about the potential deal. After about nine months, the sales sleaze was fired for not selling anything, but no investigation was made into what he was doing all this time, so the Hooterhumper wasn't fired as well.
All this time, he was being paid a salary plus hundreds of dollars a month in bonus whenever he arranged a certain number of meetings. He would simply tell his boss- my boss- how many he had set, and that's what she would pay him on. Why didn't she verify that these meetings were taking place? Simple- she invited exaggeration of results, so that she could report good numbers to the owner/president with a clear conscience. You lie to me, so I don't have to lie to my boss- I'll simply be reporting what I was told.
After the sales sleaze was fired, he was hooked up with another type of salesperson- the go-getter. This woman would take a meeting with anybody, anywhere, on the long shot that it would lead somewhere. So in the first case the company was flying the sleaze around the country to get a tan, and in the second case, they were flying the go-getter to meet with people who couldn't possibly buy our product, but might be able to introduce us to someone who could. Arguably a valid sales tactic, but the Hooterhumper's job was to court higher-ups, not call peons with a lot of free time and act as secretary. The go-getter could do that herself.
Eventually the owners whose money was at stake started to get sick of flying people around and demanded some sort of validity from these meetings. The Hooterhumper's numbers took a plunge. However, he soon developed a new scam- he would call a higher-up at a prospect's company, claiming to be a higher-up at another company, and ask them which company he should choose as his X provider, just looking for some advice, and by the way have you heard of Y company which I have heard a lot of good things about? Then he'd call back the next week and ask for the meeting.
He told our boss about it. Brilliant, she said, keep it up and maybe you'll return to those fantastic levels of performance you had before the auditing system was put into place. Never mind that a single pissed-off V.P. could absolutely tank our company by spreading the word about our unscrupulous tactics. Megacorporations have many ways of hiding their inappropriate behavior, but if you're one of a handful of companies in a field and word gets around you're a scam, you can sink fast. It's like they say, if there's two barbers in town, go to the one with the bad haircut.
This tactic combined with the go-getter allowed him to perform moderately and avoid the axe for the rest of the two years. Meanwhile, my job was running the database where, among other things, the calls he made were logged as history against the prospect's file. Knowing that he was pulling a fast one with the go-getter, I presented evidence to my boss that he was claiming credit for meetings he had not set. If the company had plants in the same town, for example, he'd claim two meetings even though the go-getter met with only one person- the person who had jurisdiction over those two locations. In one case he'd called a company, reached the higher-up, introduced our company, and convinced the person that they needed to meet with the go-getter- all in 36 seconds! Funny, it was taking the other meeting-setters weeks or months to build a rapport, send them some case studies, the usual complex-sales stuff. My boss took the evidence and put it in his personell file- after all, he was skewing upwards the results of her department! Why should she fire him even though it's all a ruse? What's that you say, for the good of the company? This is a Marketing Manager we're talking about.
What bothered me about the Hooterhumper was not that he was scamming the company (I covered my ass by reporting the scam to my superiors, but I didn't particularly care), but rather his vast sense of entitlement. This is something The Roommate possessed that is usually only found in rich kids who've never worked a day of honest work. The Hooterhumper's position on the issue was that hey, if the company wasn't going to pay him to do nothing, they were forcing him to do as little as possible to still get paid, and he was the victim because of it. This extended into everything he did- his weekly affairs, his frequent overlooked absence, and his failure to change our process to benefit him further- if he got caught/docked/denied, it was because people were keeping him down, out to get him, treating him unfairly. One time he threw food at a coworker until the guy snapped and was ready to throw down (I broke that one up, pissing off two other guys who claimed I was violating an unwritten rule of manhood by stopping a fight). The Hooterhumper's take on the issue was that he shouldn't be forced to work with someone so annoying, it was the other guy's fault, he practically forced him to pick on the guy.
Another example: At one point I took over managing the department for a month. Attendance was at 50%, meaning these salaried people were getting paid full time to show up half-time (no doubt that average was dragged down by you-know-who). So I implemented a strict procedure to deal with attendance issues. Soon enough, I got a call from the Hooterhumper- he had to take his girlfriend to the airport. Sure, no problem, I said, I'll just mark you down as absent. HH wanted to be excused because- a classic line- "If I'd have lied and said I was sick, I would be excused. So by punishing me, you're punishing my honesty." Sigh. This is why I'm not in management.
So what finally dinged him? Well, I was surprised. I thought somebody would finally look at what we've paid this guy and what we'd got out of it and remedy a long-standing mistake. But it turns out he had another scam going. He had gotten ahold of one of our corporate parking passes and duplicated it, and had been parking with it for over a year. Obviously if this was a large company with a special lot for those who have a pass, that never would have worked. They'd notice his junker among the jaguars, so to speak. But we just have a contract with a nearby public lot, and paid $12 per day per car to park there. Someone did an audit, and whattaya know, lookie here, out goes the Hooterhumper.
He was, of course, incensed. The company was being petty to fire him over such a minor thing, he said. It wasn't costing the company anything, he said (heh- you can do the math on that one, $12 a day times 52 weeks of 5 days, not to mention any legal action the parking lot might take for duping one of their passes). He might even take legal action unless somehow he realizes that he scammed the company out of a good $80,000 over the years and he should just cut his losses and find another sucker.
But there's that sense of entitlement that fuels the litigiousness of American culture. Corporations have it- 'your product makes our product obsolete so we will sue you and if we lose the government owes us a bailout'- and rich brats have it, too. My college experience was filled to the brim with these types. What causes it? Pushover parenting? Lack of hardship? It seems to show up in greater numbers among the younger generation, but I can't tell if that's because we have less hardship in our lives or we've just had less time to experience it. Who knows?
When I was a supervisor at my old job, I told everybody the same thing. (Young) people would make all kinds of crazy requests: "Can I go home? I'm tired." or "my show is on" or "I miss my boyfriend" or "I'm sick of work." I'd tell them, "Absolutely! Go right ahead! Just drop off your employee I.D. at the front desk! The HR Manager will call you to arrange an exit interview." "No, no, I want to keep my job!" "Well, then, do your job."
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