Author: DOuG pRATt

There came a day when Ted was a total no-show. It may have been a day other than Friday by that point. That’s a bit of detail I don’t recall. I gave up waiting for Ted and I called his apartment (no cellphones in 1987). His roommate said Ted wasn’t there, and he didn’t know where Ted was. I told him that if he heard from Ted, he had to get to the office ASAP.

Meeting with my boss, he said enough was enough, and that Ted needed to be put on probation. There was a formal process for doing that, and we met with the manager in charge of personnel-related matters, who gave us a form that Ted would have to sign.

When Ted finally showed up that afternoon, I sat with him for a very uncomfortable meeting, to find out what happened. He came up with an excuse that I was forced to at least consider might be true.

Ted claimed he didn’t come to work, and wasn’t at his apartment when I called, because he’d been with his parents, whose house had been defaced with a racial slur. He didn’t have an answer when I asked him why he hadn’t left a message for me. I told Ted that I used to be a reporter, and I knew that if what he said was true, it would definitely be a top story on the news that night.

Given the serious nature of Ted’s claim, he had to be given the benefit of the doubt, but there was nothing on the news that night or in the Boston Globe the next day, about a house being defaced with a racial slur. So I was left with no choice but to have Ted sign the probation form.

Ted seemed genuinely surprised and hurt. I sincerely liked Ted, and I wanted him to succeed. I felt bad making him sign a document acknowledging if there was any more trouble he could be fired.

Everything I’ve said so far is merely context to ensure a full appreciation of the upcoming plot twists. Consider this post to be the end of Part I.

In 1983-84, I took the redeye from San Francisco to Boston often enough to remember it was United flight 66 aboard a Lockheed L-1011. There’s a related story about AIDS politics from one of those business trips, that I may tell another time.

After landing at Logan, if it was a workday I’d take the MBTA to the office, briefcase and carry-on bag in hand, to write up my site report and fill out my expense report. If it was okay with my boss, I’d leave early and take the T home to my $600/month studio apartment with a stove that didn’t work, that the landlord never fixed. I relied on a hot plate and a toaster oven.

My monthly income was $1200, or about $3500 today. Enough to live on, but with half of my pay going to rent, it wasn’t enough to save up for a more expensive apartment while owning a car. So when my old car was beyond repair, I didn’t replace it.

In 1984, three years before the events of the Ted story, I came very close to quitting over money. If the senior VP I met with to discuss my dissatisfaction knew I had a job offer in my pocket for a much better salary, I undoubtedly would have been fired on the spot. Fortunately, his boss came through with more money for me, and I stayed. Good thing too, considering this was the guy who offered me the other job.

https://www.sfgate.com/news/baycitynews/article/ex-mckesson-chairman-gets-10-year-sentence-3324989.php

The point in telling about my own situation is to say that after the boss who started the group quit, and I took it over, I was very sympathetic to the concerns and complaints of the team members. My former boss had set the precedent, that if someone had a late landing at Logan, they didn’t have to show their face at the office right at 9 the next morning.

So did I extend Ted more slack than I would have anyone else? I was going to say no, but in hindsight nobody else put me in the same spot that Ted did. Then came the day when he was a no-show. No phone call, no message, and no Ted.

Tomorrow will be the running of the Boston Marathon. This is the 100th anniversary of the race distance being 26.2 miles.

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?