The Career Consigliere

Episode 36: Crazy Behavior at the Office

• America's White Collar Wise Guy • Episode 36

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Organizations are filled with people, and people aren't perfect.  At some point, everyone misses a meeting, sends the report late, or forgets to copy someone on an email - all to be expected.  But work in the corporate world long enough and eventually you'll witness some less-than-stellar and, at times, shocking behavior.

Today's episode focuses on exactly this:  you'll hear some wild stories of office behavior gone off the rails.  And, you'll also learn how you can respond and what you can do if you're ever faced with something similar.  

Enjoy!

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Whaddaya hear, whaddya say?  Welcome to episode 36 of the Career Consigliere podcast: your no frills, no BS forum for navigating the corporate job scene.  We’re back with you once again for what we hope to be a highly informative and engaging half an hour, or so!  The last few episodes have focused on some pretty serious subject matter, so today we’re going to take a break and relax with some entertaining and 100% true stories about horrifying workplace behavior.  Maybe you’ll find them comical, maybe a bit disturbing, or maybe they’ll just leave you scratching your head.  In any case, I can promise that all of them happened exactly as described.  I’ll bring you on the journey of what took place, and today’s lesson will be very simple and straightforward:  never do ANY of this!  Bottom line.  And we’ll also talk about what you can do if you see anything like this happening around you at the office.  Get ready for an entertaining one today:  so podcast land, grab some popcorn and let’s do it!

First up, we have the “case of the stolen sandwich”.  In my first job right after college, I worked in a shared services center for a big corporation.  Standard corporate campus type of environment:  place was built in the 70s, still had drop ceiling tiles from the original construction, many of them had yellow stains on them from back when you were actually allowed to smoke in the office – you get the idea:  that should paint the picture for you.  You had probably about 1,000 people working in the building, so obviously they had a cafeteria on-site:  but it was horribly overpriced and really nothing special, so more often than not a lot of us would pack lunch:  healthier, and way more cost effective.

I’m a creature of habit, anyone who knows me could back that up, so I always packed a turkey sandwich, a yogurt, a granola bar, and an apple.  Like clockwork – 5 days a week, this was what I chowed down on.  But one time, for some reason, either I was running low on cold cuts or just wanted to be adventurous, I decided to shake it up a little bit.  I bought one of those pre-made sandwiches that you get from the deli area at the supermarket, and I was all excited for it:  actually looked forward to it throughout the day (a true testament to how exciting that job was).  

Now this building was massive, so it was divided into different sections by department.  There were multiple coffee break areas that all had refrigerators where you can keep food throughout the day.  So I brought my sandwich in a plastic shopping bag, the ones that are becoming increasingly hard to find now, along with an apple and a yogurt.  I put it in the fridge just like I always did, and went about my day.  So come lunchtime, I think my crew usually hit the cafeteria around 12:30, I went to grab my lunch bag from the fridge.  And it was there, right where I had left it, along with the apple and the yogurt:  but no more sandwich.  I always tied the plastic bag with a knot at the top to keep stuff from falling out, and there were no holes in the bag when I put it in there.  But now, there was a massive, gaping hole in the side, where the sandwich had clearly made its exit.  Didn’t even need due process on this one: I checked the rest of the fridge, and the sandwich was nowhere to be found:  no doubt, someone stole it.  

And this told me something:  since my process was the same every day, since I always brought my regular lunch in a plastic shopping bag just like this, I knew that the sandwich I brought that particular day was the difference maker.  Clearly, we had a scavenger in the building:  someone, possibly even more than one person, who would go through the refrigerator and siphon the goods from unsuspecting people while they were at their desk.  My regular lunch obviously wasn’t attractive to them, but the more exotic, footlong hero I brought that day got scooped right up.  If you ask me, very low chance that this was a coincidence, and certainly no accident:  the ripped a whole in the knotted bag to take it – they had to go out their way to do this, so we can take chance completely out of the equation.

I still had the apple and the yogurt, which was better than nothing, but then I had to put my tail between my legs and go buy something from the horribly overpriced and very average cafeteria line.  So fast-forward to after lunch.  We had a departmental email distribution list that we would use to send out helpful tips, updates, anything that needed to be mass-communicated (this is back when there was just email and chat:  digital collaboration platforms were nowhere near what they are now). 

So at that time, an average dude like me sending an email to the entire department was common practice.   So I figured I’d have some fun with it, and I wrote an email that took a humorous tone and said something to the effect of “To the thief that stole my sandwich:  you know who you are.  I hope you enjoyed it.  I hope that riding coat tails off of the $7.25 someone else spent for lunch makes you feel big and bad and accomplished.  I hope it gives you more satisfaction than this job does, because clearly just coming here and doing your work every day isn’t enough of a thrill for you.”  And I hope you’re not allergic to anything that was on there, because if the ambulance shows up today, I’m gonna know exactly who you are.”.   And I’ll say, a bunch of my colleagues chimed in and kept the ball rolling for me.  We all had some fun with it and it really was no big deal, but you’d be surprised just how petty and ridiculous people can be at the office.  A lot of us knew each other pretty well, so you almost have to admire the brazenness it takes to steal from someone you know right under their nose.  And since that day, I always brought an insulated lunch box with an ice pack and kept my food at my desk with me – wasn’t rolling the dice again.

Next, we’ll call this one “the swingset hustler”.  This one actually took place at an internship that I did in my senior year of college.  I was there for a total of 7 months:  it started in January of that year, right at the beginning of the spring semester, and they kept me on for a few months after graduation.  They actually did eventually offer me a full-time job, but I turned them down for a whole host of reasons, some of which are going to become very obvious to you as we go through these harrowing tales ahead.   

My function there was to support the field sales team.  As sales representatives, of course my colleagues spent most of their time visiting customers and trying to sell the goods, but Mondays were known as “phone block days”.  In other words, they were all required to come into the office on Mondays and spend the day literally on the phone, calling all their customers and setting up all their appointments that they’d go to all the other days of the week.  

Let’s think about what it takes to be a good sales representative:  stereotypically, you have to be highly competitive, aggressive, and allergic to the word “no”.  Companies are getting away from training sales teams this way, at least from what I’ve seen, but this was a long time ago and this company definitely had that old-school mindset.  So, you put 5 of these people in a room all making calls to customers and getting hung up on, rejected, and cursed out all in relative unison, and it won’t take long to start seeing some extremely emotional and raw behavior.  The products they sold were pretty low dollars, relatively speaking:  a few thousand here, a few thousand there, so this was the kind of environment where you had to fight for every penny and hit really aggressive targets that were actually kind of unfair, to be honest.

But despite selling a low-dollar product, we had one sales guy who was the king of the castle.  He broke a record that year for making a $200K sale to this one account, almost unheard of in that business, and after that he walked on water.  Not only did everyone in the place worship him, but that one deal basically satisfied all his sales targets for the year…..and it was January.  So nonetheless, he pranced around like a total douche and was a real piece of work to be around.  Not only that, but he was also a severely flawed human being.  Would brag openly about how many times (and how frequently) he cheated on his wife – morals were in the toilet.  We’re not talking about a stud either, so I can’t imagine these mistresses of his were anything worth bragging about, so you get the picture:  you know the kind of guy I’m talking about.  

So you won’t be surprised when I tell you what he did one day.  During what was supposed to be his phone block time (he was on auto pilot for the year, remember), he decides that he wanted an extra discount for a swing set that he had just recently bought his 5 year-old daughter.  The swingset hadn’t been delivered yet, so he figured he’d try and ask for expedited delivery for a birthday party that was supposed to be happening that coming weekend.  And when the retailer obviously wouldn’t be able to meet that request, he would then demand his extra discount.  So he calls up the customer service line right there in the office:  these were bench-style desks, all right next to one another with the 9-ft. cubicle walls separating them.  So in this office, you can see and hear everything going on, and he had absolutely no shame.

He explained the situation civilly, but as soon as he inevitably ran into some pushback from the agent he was dealing with, he started getting very irate:  “What do you mean you can’t do it?  Do you know what it’s like to be a father?  And guess what, now you’re gonna ruin my daughter’s birthday!!”  I’ll give him credit:  he WAS a trained salesman, and a very good one, so after about an hour of going through every level of management at the place, waiting on hold, then berating the next level supervisor, they eventually caved and gave him what he wanted.  And as soon as the scales tipped in his favor, I’ll never forget this:  This was back in the days of wired phones in the offices, meaning yes, he used the company phone for this stunt.  He puts his hand over the phone receiver and says in this voice laden with sick, twisted hubris, “I got it, I got it!!”.  

The highlight of this guy’s day was ripping off a department store chain over a swingset.  And he chose to do it on company time, using company equipment, and disrupting everyone else around him.  Now pretty much everyone else there was also questionable on a moral level:  not quite as bad as him, but I can promise you that none of them are gonna have their likeness on a stained glass window anytime soon.  And the best part about this?  The boss walked in right when mr. congeniality was right at his boiling point, and the boss asks the others “is he on the phone with a customer?”.  And when the answer was no, the boss goes “oh ok, good”, and just laughed and walked away.   

I was speechless.  I was 21 years old when this took place, but still couldn’t’ believe things like this were happening.  For one, I had more faith in humanity than to stoop that low over a swingset:  Mr. Moneybags definitely had the cash for it.  But what appalled me more is that nobody else seemed bothered by this:  it was just literally “another day at the office”, which tells me that stuff like this was a regular occurrence there.  And boy was it ever!  I witnessed a whole BUNCH of events like this in that very same office.  Maybe we’ll get into them another time, but what lessons can we learn from stuff like this?  What do stories like these tell us about the kinds of organizations we’re working for?  Let’s answer that with today’s…..consigliere curtain call.  

I can’t beat the company up too much over the stolen sandwich situation.  They had a bad actor or two working in the place, but petty theft on a person-to-person level really has nothing to do with the company.  The lesson here is that, anytime you’re working in a large organization with a lot of people present in the same space as you, just be aware of your surroundings.  There’s that old adage of “safety in numbers”.  Obviously nobody’s going to steal anything if they think they’re gonna get caught, especially when their job hangs in the balance.  But when you have hundreds of people in the place, and they’re all sharing the same limited resources and equipment, anonymity goes up, it’s much easier to get lost in the shuffle, and stupid petty acts like this are much harder to trace.  So the only wisdom I can impart on you here is, when you go to work, make believe you’re on the subway:  keep all your belongings close to you, don’t let anything out of your sight, and hide your valuables.  And, of course, if you see something, say something!  None of this applies if you’re working remotely, but if you’re in an office environment, even if it’s just SOME of the time, always be hawk-eyeing your surroundings and be very aware of what’s going on around you.   

Now for the swingset hustler.  This one comes down to organizational culture and norms.  And this is no attack on salespeople:  if organizations didn’t have highly motivated people selling their products and services, then the economy would crumble:  it’s that simple.  And you DO have to maintain a certain level of persistence to be successful in sales:  you’re always going to get rejections, and you have to be strategic about handling them to save the sale and keep the company in business.  But true professionals know when to turn that off.  This dude pulling that kind of stunt in the office, in front of everyone, on company time, and with company equipment, sent a very clear message that this wasn’t about a swingset:  it was about him getting what he wanted and proving a point.  And all corporations have their share of bad actors:  but this place actually CONDONED it!  Remember, the boss heard this going on, and all he did was laugh it off.  So right there, the message is loud and clear:  Hey!  As long as your sales numbers are good, we don’t care, behave however you want!

But with such low standards for behavior, what do you think the overall prognosis is for that kind of company?  After they make the sale, are they going to treat their customers well?  Are the other employees who see and hear these kinds of things going to behave ethically in THEIR jobs?  Are they going to do things the right way, or are they going to cut corners and look for the easy way out?  Unfortunately, toxic behavior like this is contagious, and will spread like wildfire throughout the company if you don’t keep it in check.  And eventually, it’s going to hurt the company’s reputation and ultimately their performance in the market.  You might be high on the hog for a while, but in a place like this, even the highest level of success is only temporary:  eventually the tide will turn against you, and there’s no possible way it’s going to end well.  So if you find yourself working in a place like this, get out as soon as you can because I PROMISE, after a certain point nothing good is going to happen there.  

Sadly folks, that’s all the time we have for today.  But have no fears, and shed no tears, because I’ll be back with a new episode very soon.  As they say in the industry:  no listeners, no show, so do me a favor, and stay loyal!  If you find value in my content, please leave me a nice review, tell all your friends, and don’t forget to like, subscribe, and follow on whatever platform you use to get your podcasts.   Beyond the confines of your headphones, speakers, TV screen, or any other crazy contraption with the ability to stream audio, I also provide one-on-one career assistance, so visit my website at career-consigliere.net to learn more about me, book me for a private consult, join my email list, or explore some of the other career services I offer.  And to all of you out there in podcast land, remember this:  Who’s the boss in your career?  You, nobody else.