Tommy

(This is story #7 of my employment stories. For an introduction to these stories, click here. Other stories are below this post.)

How do you really know someone? Time and familiarity turn acquaintances into friends, but interviews are brief and - frankly - adversarial. Resumes may or may not be honest. I have seen fabrications of schools attended, degrees earned, and jobs held. These days, most former employers will not give references beyond the verification of dates of employment, and an employer who raves about someone may simply be hoping you'll hire their former employee so that they will no longer have to pay his/her Unemployment or Disability costs. So, how do you really judge someone in the space of a brief interview?

Our business had grown, necessitating the hiring of additional staff, and, as it happened, two of them were young, attractive women. They enjoyed the work and enjoyed dealing with the variety of applicants and hires who came through the office. They especially liked Tommy.

Tommy was a college student who had come in to apply for work for the company who provided food services at his school. He was blonde, very charming and cute (picture Brad Pitt in his Thelma and Louise role), and he was an A student. One of the girls placed him, and they all looked forward to him coming in on a Friday to pick up his paycheck or popping in to pester them about when he might get "hired on" at the college. At such times, all work would stop and there would be good natured chatter between them.

And then it happened: Tommy told us that his supervisor had offered him a "permanent" job. He would go on the customer's payroll and thereby have work through the summer and beyond until he graduated. The girls congratulated him and wished him well, remarking after he left how they were going to miss seeing him.

A day later I received a phone call from one of the college Vice Presidents: "I want Tommy out of here. I don't know how this happened, but he is not supposed to be anywhere on this campus except his classrooms. He has no business in the cafeteria or anywhere else."

Stunned, I asked what had happened and learned that Tommy had been attending the college on a prison release program. He had served three years in a State prison for the violent assault and rape of a co-ed. He had broken into a dormitory of a college he was not attending and brutally attacked a Resident Assistant, someone he apparently didn't even know.

The caller then told me about his former colleague at the college, a man who worked in the personnel office for several years and then moved to a "better" job at a business downstate. As all H.R. people must, that man occasionally had to lay off or terminate employees, and one of those terminations at this new "better" job returned to the work site with a gun and killed him. "So please do not tell Tommy that I called you."

I assured the caller that I would terminate Tommy - would simply tell him there was some reorganization and "the college" realized they could not hire anyone new at the moment - and I would certainly get to the bottom of how Tommy managed to be hired by us.

For several minutes, I sat at my desk absorbing what had just transpired, then called staff together and told them about the phone call. Faces went ashen, then the interviewer who had hired Tommy said she had checked references and they were fine. She couldn't believe what I was saying.

I decided to check the references myself, calling on the pretense that I had just interviewed Tommy and was considering him for a job: "He seems like a good kid. What can you tell me about him?" I asked. As the interviewer had said, Tommy's references were good - although knowing what I knew, I could see that one of them was undoubtedly covering for that three-year stretch of time when he was in prison. The "reference" was supposedly a self-employed contractor, but I suspect he was simply Tommy's friend or relative. "He was a good worker. He worked on and off when I needed him for big jobs. He's a good guy." Another reference was more recent and raved about Tommy. Tommy had "kept the books" for her at the tiny corner grocery, a grocery that I'd always suspected of dealing in more than food...

I called Tommy and broke the news that not only would he not be hired on by my customer, but that because the semester had ended, his assignment with us was also finished. He took the news cheerfully, thanked me for the job, and was in every way a complete gentleman. He never asked why, and so I did not offer reasons - although I was prepared to. I told him I would mail him his final paycheck so he wouldn't need to stop in the office for it.

What he had been convicted of is awful, and I certainly can't excuse his deceitful dealings with my business, but it also rankled me a bit that the college was willing to take his tuition money without allowing him any of the usual "privileges" that come with that purchase. It seemed to me that either he was dangerous or he wasn't. Why would it be okay to let him into a classroom but not a cafeteria?

Three years later I hired an acquaintance to patch some brick-work on the front of my building. The fellow was a member of A.A. ("Hello. My name is Jim and I'm an alcoholic.") He said he'd bet I meet all kinds of people in my work, to which I responded with a couple of stories, one of them the veiled story of Tommy, of course leaving out the names and specifics. Suddenly the brick-layer stopped me: "Wait a minute. I know who you're talking about. That's Tommy. I know him and I know that story. I know it because we used to be drinking buddies and I was with him that night. Tommy was so drunk that there's no way he physically could have done it. He passed out. The cops picked him up near the college. He was framed."
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