Bad Apples

“You can not keep every bad apple out of the barrel.”

Unfortunately, this is an unspoken maxim well known to just about every employer. No matter what vetting system you use, all the way from just “trusting your gut,” to background investigations and even lie detector tests, it’s gonna happen. Some malefactor is going to slip past your defenses.

Desert Crucible was not immune.

In one case we hired a bright, likeable young man who proved to be popular both with his fellow employees and with our customers. He was a diligent worker, and everyone seemed to like him. Then, a few weeks after he was hired, things began to mysteriously disappear – articles belonging both to our employees and to the foundry.

From the management side, we upped our diligence and became more focused on the problem. We started taking more care not to allow targets of opportunity, and more carefully watched what people were doing. I tried to be fair minded and felt bad when I realized I was beginning to focus more on our new guy.

Then one day he failed to show up for work. The next day we received a message from someone who professed to be a friend of his, saying that his mother had passed away and that he was going to have to take a week or so off to deal with family issues. I checked his employee file and found nothing on his parents. I considered trying to search public records, but I did not know his mother’s name.

So, on a hunch, I called the Police Department and found that he had been arrested and booked into jail on burglary charges.

He called me about a week later to tell me he would be back to work in a few days. I expressed sympathy about his mother, and he brought me up to date on arrangements. Then I asked how he had managed to accomplish all that from a jail cell.

He hung up the phone.

It turned out that he was the apparent ringleader of a gang of “cat burglars” that had eluded the police for months.

About two years later I was very surprised to get a call from a local bank, asking me for a reference on this guy. They were considering hiring him as a teller!

Back in those days an employer had to be very cautious when responding to a request for a reference, as anything negative you might say could come back to bite you in terms of a lawsuit from the former employee. It did not take long for the woman from the bank to become very frustrated with me. “You are not being very helpful. This is a bright young man that we are looking to hire, and you are not directly answering my questions!”

“Perhaps you should pose different questions.”

She hesitated, then gasped, then started to speak, then gasped again and thanked me profusely for my time.