Pretty

Sometimes I like to think about all the crazy things that happen in HR - the investigations into drugs, sex at work, violence, stalking, theft.  I think about the people I fired and if it was just.  Often it wasn't.  I had one job for 2 years where I fired about 6 people a week, mostly for dumb things like being late too many times or taking too long on a phone call or taking too long to use the bathroom.  

Of course, there are the people I wish I could have fired - the cruel, the bullies, the plant barfers.  And like the people that are always walking around at different events naked, they are never the ones you want to see naked.  Or employed.  

After 18 years of doing this, I like to think I understand people and their motivations, but I have been very very wrong several times, been fooled and driven by misplaced compassion.

There was a woman who was 8 months pregnant and her husband was stationed in Iraq.  She came to me one day crying with her supervisor because she said she was being stalked by another employee.  She recounted how they hadn’t met, but began talking on the phone and emailing each other.  She was lonely and he was showing her attention.  Then he showed her his photo.  Gorgeous dark brown hair, green eyes, a mouth I shouldn’t have thoughts about on a 20 year old kid. 

They arranged to meet for coffee and she never showed.  He began texting her, asking where she was, why didn’t she want to meet him.  She said she knew it was wrong.  She showed me the texts, some were flirty, but not violent or overtly sexual – but she was terrified.  Shaking. 

She showed me another text where he said enough creepy things that I was sure we needed to get rid of this guy, to protect a vulnerable employee and to protect the company.  No way was I going to have a pregnant Iraq vet’s wife hurt or threatened by another employee.

In stalking cases, I generally call in the police – so the victim can file a report and the police can decide if they want to arrest the suspect or just scare him or her (yep, there are lots of hers).  I did that in this case, had approval from legal, documented all of my sources – I was just waiting for IT to pull the rest of the emails so I could make sure I wasn’t missing anything.

I had him in the room next to me sitting with his supervisor, terrified.  He wasn’t the guy in the photo, he was a chubby, kind of smelly, unattractive guy.  He admitted he had sent the other photo to her so she would go out with him.  When I read the emails, they were awful – very sexually inappropriate and all generated from her.  He responded, it wasn’t like he wasn’t interested, and he was inappropriate, but nothing compared to her.

When I spoke to him about what on earth had happened, he admitted the flirting and that they had planned to meet, but when he showed up and texted her that he was waiting at the front door, she had taken one look at him and run.  His texts were little more than asking if she was OK and why she hadn’t shown up. 

I was pissed.  I had the cops there, all the pieces ready, and I asked her why she had lied to me.  She said, “he was ugly”.