The Bad Apple

A long time ago, a friend of mine was fired from his job due to a safety violation. It amounted to him totalling a work truck on a state road after he crashed into a retaining wall. The investigation showed that a nail on the road had punctured the tire, and that the tire immediately exploded. This caused "Jim" to lose control of the truck and the truck careened into the wall. Jim was fine but the truck was totalled. The investigation also revealed that Jim was driving 55mph in a 45mph zone and so he was fired. Safety violations, you see, poor judgement.

It was known that there had been tension between Jim and his new supervisor and yet there had been no previous safety issues and no paper trail and thus no due process.

My team, of course, could see through the ruse and so we lobbied our supervisor to hire Jim. Jim was a good hand and well liked among the locker room. The wheels were set in motion until Jim's old boss called our boss and pointed out that if we hired Jim, this would undermine the allegations of safety and poor judgement. Our boss then went to his boss to explain the situation and ask for guidance. The conversation went something like this, "Boss, you see, the boys want to hire this fellow Jim from another district. Jim's a great guy, but there's a problem - Jim was just fired owing to safety issues, you know, poor judgement. What should we do?"

Jim, of course, never made it to our team in Alaska.

Recently, this happened again, but this time at a different office. I thought that the bad apple theory went out with the bathwater twenty years ago?

See you next week -

Drew