Ted Talk – 4

Although Ted was the only person I ever fired, there were a couple other guys, both White, who came close. One of them transferred to a non-traveling group after I told him he had to stop submitting his bar tabs as dinner receipts on his expense reports.

Years later, when I was reporting to a different boss, the other guy was an existing employee who had been foisted on me after he hadn’t worked out in another group. He would return from lunch bleary-eyed and smelling of booze. Fortunately for me, he quit on the day I was going to reprimand him for his poor job performance.

Ted had made it through the requisite probationary period, and his first solo business trip went well, according to the customer. He seemed to be a good fit for my installation group, but it didn’t take too much longer for the trouble to begin.

Life on the road required crazy hours, including occasional weekend travel, and doing whatever needed to be done, whenever it had to be done. So back at the office there was some flexibility with the schedule, but everybody needed to be in by 10. The weeks when Ted wasn’t traveling, he started coming in late on Fridays.

The office was in Cambridge, and Ted lived in Cambridge with a roommate. He took the subway to work, so he didn’t have a long or difficult commute.

After a couple of times when Ted didn’t show up until well after 10, I asked him what was going on. He was doing his DJ side gig on Thursday nights. I said something like, “That’s cool. Enjoy it, but don’t let it interfere with your job, okay Ted?” My little internal warning bell started ringing again.

Ted wasn’t the only company employee with a side job or avocation. One had a weekend food concession stand on Boston Common. Another worked with the fireworks company that put on the big 4th of July shows with the Boston Pops. Before retiring, when I was, to my regret, a boss once again, I suspected a telecommuter was taking extra long lunches to be an Uber driver. Thirty years earlier, before cell phones, it wasn’t easy locating Ted when he was a no-show.

Ted was a sharp dressed young man, but when he made his late appearances on Fridays he looked like he’d had a late night, and not much got done the rest of the day. Repeated verbal warnings didn’t help. I couldn’t tell Ted he had to quit doing whatever he was doing Thursday nights. All I could do was remind him to be in by 10 on Fridays, and that I was becoming concerned about his job performance.

The guy who drank his dinner was put on notice because he passed out while dining with a customer. A woman in my group, who was a co-worker at the time, caused a huge problem when she was with a customer, and made what was perceived to be a pass at another woman. That event resulted in a contract change allowing customers to reject any company representative from further in-person visits for any reason.

I began to worry how Ted was handling himself when he was away on business. Consulting with my boss, we decided to risk waiting to see if a customer complained or even invoked the contract clause. Would they be reluctant to do that because Ted was Black? For that matter, was Ted being Black a consideration for me, as his supervisor, to cut him some extra slack?