One Of The Worst

For the 4.5 of you who read this blog, you know that I've had all types of leadership roles throughout my career. I've been the Assistant Dean for Faculty and Graduate Student Development in a school of business, the Economics Department Chairperson at a different university and the Executive Director of an Institute for political economy at another. With all of those roles came the responsibility of being the boss of staff people. To be clear, staff people are different from faculty members who really have no boss after they get tenure. Look back in this blog at my seven-part series, Professional Life, to see the horrors of trying to deal with tenure-track faculty members. It was like herding cats to deal with faculty. However, staff were different. They generally were local folks from the community who mostly had some college but that wasn't absolutely needed to do the job. They did not teach but helped with various important administrative tasks for the unit. The real difference was that I was, indeed, their boss. I did their annual evaluations and could hire and fire them (within the guidelines of the employee handbook).

Some were real gems who I still keep in touch with today. Since the faculty would come and go from the university fairly regularly, it was the staff who knew everything and kept the place running. No, the staff did not produce any research, nor did they teach but the faculty couldn't do their jobs without these staff folks doing theirs. I've had many administrative assistants who knew where I needed to be before I did and had scheduled a meeting before I had thought about it. I'd look up to find a meeting on my calendar which I had not known I needed. Some realized that their job was to make sure that certain problems never reached me so that I could do my job. Like I said, just excellent people. 

But on the other hand, I had this one employee who was simply terrible. In fact, I would venture to say that not only was he the worst employee that I ever had, he was the worst employee in the world. I will call this guy Jack. That's not his real name and there is no way that he reads this blog but why have the hassle? The guy is long gone but he still haunts me.

Jack was my administrative assistant but was so lazy and incompetent that he could only do exactly as he was told. Even then, doing the minimum correctly was a stretch for this guy. If it weren't for the fact that our Human Resources office at this university seemed to be designed to protect people like him, I'd have fired him on my first day there. I don't know how the previous director dealt with this guy. Jack was the type of person that you'd have to give step-by-step instructions to do simple things. If I told Jack to send you an email, he'd send you a blank email. Why? You never told him to put words in the document. I'm not kidding either. I spent half of my day either doing things myself because it took too long to write out the instructions for him or wasting valuable time thinking of how I could get him to move. Every year we'd do certain things like a meeting with me and all of my center directors, yet every year I needed to tell him to contact the directors about the meetings, arrange a time and place, then remember to put it on my calendar. His typical response was "you didn't tell me to do that." I swear, if I told this guy to go use the bathroom, he'd still be sitting in there now because I never told him to come out. 

Here are some stories that further explain why this guy was the worst employee on the planet.

When I arrived to be the executive director of the Institute, it was January of 2021. Most of the world was still reeling from the impacts of the global Covid-19 pandemic. My university, like most around the globe still had a mask mandate. Inside of buildings people needed to wear masks if they had other people in their space. Jack had on no mask. I asked him why he wasn't wearing a mask and he responded that he had a note from his doctor. He did, in fact, have a note. People must have asked him about it so much that he had it laminated and whipped it out often. I let it go as I was new to the place and had many other issues to attend to. However, about two weeks later, I circled back to the mask issue. I asked Jack if he had given the note to our HR department and gotten an exemption from the mask mandate through the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). He said that he had the note. I told him that this wasn't enough and he'd need to go get his exemption. Needless to say, he tried to stall me but I told him that if he didn't have a signed exemption from HR by the end of the day, he'd need to wear the mask or go home without pay. He contacted HR who looked over the note and quickly determined that he was not eligible for an exemption and needed to wear the mask like everyone else. He huffed and puffed and said that he'd immediately go back to his doctor and get a more appropriate note from his doctor. He also threatened that he was going to contact his lawyer. In the end, neither one occurred. Jack was just being a pain. My question was why my predecessor in the role didn't challenge Jack and get this situation fixed in the 10 months before I arrived on the job? It took me about 3 weeks to get it done. This guy, Jack, never did anything but always talked as if he would do everything. 

I had been at the place for about 3 years when I got word that Jack was banned from going to the coffee shop on campus named PJ's. PJ's was a local place with about 20 or 30 locations throughout the region. Not as big as a Starbucks but more than a little mom-and-pop operation. How was it that Jack managed to get himself banned from all of their locations? Well, apparently, he had gone into the location on campus and ordered a cup of coffee but then felt the need to make the comment that he was so delighted to see someone working in the store who was slim and fit. Both the server and manager said that how she looked had no bearing on her job performance and that the comment was inappropriate. They asked him to apologize. He refused. He said that he had the right to say whatever he wanted. They agreed but that they had to right to ban him from that store and all other PJ's locations, which they did. This story got to me but didn't surprise me. Jack had a reputation on campus. In another instance, it had been less than 9 months earlier that I had gotten another report from my then boss, the provost of the university, about Jack. The university was moving away from fluorescent light bulbs to LED type bulbs and had contracted with a firm to do it. When the firm made their way to our building, we had been notified that people would be coming through our space causing minor distractions as they did their work. The crew seemed to be entirely Hispanic with limited English-speaking ability. When they showed up at my door, I let them in and they got to work. About 10 minutes later, they were gone, and I got back to it. Apparently, things didn't go so smoothly with Jack. He must have had some form of a conflict with these guys. I'm not sure how, but Jack was Jack. He then calls the person over facilities to complain about having people who can't even speak the language in his office. The person was so offended by whatever Jack said (I never got an account of exactly what he said but I can imagine) that they told their boss, and they told their boss, until it got all the way to the provost, who told me to watch out for Jack. Ugh. 

In the summer of 2024, Donald Trump was running for election to the presidency of the US, for a third time. It so happened that two attempts were made on his life during the campaigning period. In fact, he has been lauded for him raising his fist in defiance with a bloody ear after one such assassination attempt. See here. Jack liked that image so much that he had it made into a poster and put it up prominently in his office, which was also our reception area since he was the main secretary for the unit. I didn't see the poster because I avoided talking to Jack because I despised him and never went to his office. I mostly communicated with him through email despite the fact that our doors opened to each other's office. I liked using email because it gave me a record of what was said between us. One day about 2 months after he put the poster up, I got a complaint from a student who didn't like seeing that thing every time they walked in the office. I then went to look and sure enough, there was a poster with that image. Yikes! I immediately took a picture with my phone and emailed HR. They said that he had to take the poster down. Trump was a candidate running for office and there could be no such posters of active candidates on display. I gathered up my documents and told Jack that the poster had to come down. I told him why and where he could find it in the employee handbook and I gave him the name and number of the HR person who he needed to call. Of course, Jack being Jack, he claimed he was being attacked for his political views. He threatened to get his "lawyer" on this case. That never happened. After talking with HR he was really upset. He said that he was going to go all over campus and make sure that all of the pictures and posters of Kamala Harris be reported and taken down too. The problem was that there were no posters of Harris. There never were. All he found was a cartoon on someone's door of the Boondocks who were making fun of George Bush from 2003. That was 22 years ago! This guy was a piece of work. 

In November of 2024, Donald Trump won re-election to the White House. Needless, to say, Jack was ecstatic. However, his feelings were not shared by all. I never show any of my political leanings at work. It's part of the reason that I never talked to people about my personal life at work. I didn't want to know what you thought, especially if you liked Trump, and I didn't want you thinking you knew what I thought (because you didn't). On the day after the election, one of my staff members was in her office crying. She was white, just like Jack, but had a very different view of Mr. Trump and the direction of the country. Apparently, Jack walked into her office just as happy as can be and asked why she was sad. It was a great day. She said that she had a lot on her mind. Jack then tells her "don't you get it? Now, Hoov will work for us." So, the implications are clear here, a black man with 25 years of experience and a doctorate in economics will be working for a some-college white secretary simply because of skin tone. The other staffer was shocked. When Jack left, she came and told me what had happened. Since I wasn't there and it was just her word against his, there was nothing that could be done. 

When I arrived at the institute it was January of 2021. I found it interesting that up until that point, the staff had never had a staff meeting. How in the world did they get any work done? I implemented a monthly staff meeting. Since we still had Covid protocols, the meetings were held over Zoom. Even after the end of Covid, we kept the meetings on Zoom. Without fail, Jack would fall asleep on camera at every single meeting. The other staff would watch to see how long it would take him to doze off because he definitely was going to. After every meeting, I'd admonish him to stay awake in meetings. Didn't matter, his head would droop and he'd be out. Not long, maybe a minute or so then he'd pop back up.

By now, you're wondering what did he do all day and why didn't I fire him? The second question is easy. Recall, I tried to fire him and HR would not give me permission. I won't write about the sleeping in the staff meeting thing in this post, but they said that this could be excused. Generally, they said that you can't fire a guy for doing exactly what you told them to do. Did I tell him to put words in an email? If so, what words? The bottom line is that nothing can be implied or assumed. Total BS if you ask me. What he did spend his days doing was writing in chat rooms. Probably right-wing outlets, if I know him. He also had this weird fascination with cats. He LOVED cats. He'd talk about cats for hours. He had cameras in his house and he'd sign in at work to see what his cats were doing at home. Of course, if I were coming into his office, he'd quickly change screens from the chat rooms or watching cats. However, recall that I rarely came into his office because I despised him. I'd often think of his nickname as being Cat Porn. I never called him that to his face, but it fit. He thought about cats way too much for a healthy man.

I defy any of you 4.5 readers to come up with an example of a worse employee. He was the pits. He's gone now but the stain of ever having him around will remain for decades.

Got a question or comment about this post or any of the others? Contact me at: garyhoover2012 [at] gmail.com.