I fired our receptionist/secretary this morning, and didn't so much as go through a single second of feeling bad about it.
After all, she deserved it. She was a slacker who we think spent most of her day web surfing and chatting with girlfriends on-line. And at the end of each day, she'd use one of those track eliminators to remove (or so she thought), all evidence of what she'd been doing.
We'd suspected it for a while, but after Friday's incident, we did some real checking.
Friday? Let's just say we had a display of absolute disrespect, followed by a major dummy spit, followed by "I just can't stay here today. I need the rest of the day off", closely followed by secretary (let's call her "K") scuttling out the door.
It struck me that it may have been no co-incidence that Friday was deadline day for a number of key projects that we'd handed over to K, and the only reason I was in the office at all was to go through them with her.
SO I spent a couple of hours trawling through her computer and found... nothing.
And I really mean "nothing"... not a single word processing or spreadsheet file had been created or altered in the two preceeding weeks.
No wonder she had to go home sick... she hadn't finished her assignment. I remember using that trick once or twice, but the difference is, that was primary school, and this is life.
The odd part was every time Dr J or I passed her desk, she'd be typing away furiously, looking awfully productive. This makes me sad. I used to swear blind that if ever I was fortunate enough to be able to employ other people, I would never spy on them, and would give them space to get on with the job without constant fear of me looking over the shoulder.
Now I'm starting to rethink. Are all employees slackers who won't actually do the work unless the boss rides them all day?
1 comment:
Are they all slackers? No - just some of them, perhaps even many of them, but not all. At least she wasn't downloading porn on the work computer (hope).
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