I’m retired now, but over almost 50 years in the workforce doing everything from drudge menial to drudge professional, I worked with quite a few people along the way who, oddly, were never on the receiving end of a Nobel nomination. In no particular order:
Ken who had essentially no social skills. He’d make lecherous comments about female customers, just out of their range of hearing. Nominally had a girlfriend, but she lived on the other side of the continent and he’d never met her in person, all interaction had been online. Professed to having a second job as a professional karaoke singer.
Michael, my boss at my second paycheck job as a teenager (in a one-screen movie theater) who frequently accused me and other employees of stealing from the cash registers, who was one day lead off in handcuffs for embezzlement.
Belinda who I had to teach three times how to read the fractions on a ruler.
Ron who got laid off (a polite way of saying fired, in his case) mid-shift but continued (even after his account had been scrubbed from the network) to sit at his desk for several hours as if nothing had happened. It was a small enough company that we had no security to escort him from the building. The owner eventually called police who came and told Ron that if he didn’t leave with them voluntarily, he’d be arrested for trespassing. He did finally stand up from his desk and walk away under his own power. The security code to the office door that had been unchanged for years was changed that afternoon.
Charles who never seemed to be around when it came time for a nasty assignment to be doled out. Where’s Charles?
Several coworkers who paid much more attention to their musical careers that never seemed to progress beyond once-every-two-months pass the hat gigs at dive bars than they did to their paycheck jobs.
Rodney was always able to find some out-of-the-way place in the warehouse to take a few hits of ganja but struggled to find his time card in the alphabetical order whenever it was time to punch in for a shift or punch out from it.
Ernesto who was almost illiterate but pretended to re-read the same comic book over and over. The one printed in Greek, a language he didn’t speak.
Arthur, a manager who spent much of his time devising ever-changing plans to reorganize the work space layout but decided that a filing cabinet was a better place for checks from clients than a bank deposit envelope. Higher-ups eventually started to wonder why accounts receivable had fallen into arrears. One day, Arthur was gone. We were told to not talk about it.
Mike always wore one-color outfits. Shirt, pants, belt, socks, and shoes. For all I know, underwear too. Everything blue on Mondays, everything brown on Tuesdays, everything green on Wednesdays, everything black on Thursdays, everything red on Fridays. No idea what he wore on weekends.
Andrea who never tired of telling us how many Miller Genuine Drafts she’d consumed the night before. She once got frostbite in the middle of the summer after she fell asleep (drunk of course) with an ice pack on her ankle.
Although it’s a bit of a truism that you can be lazy OR dishonest OR plain stupid and still be employed, I worked with more than a few people who were able to pull off all three simultaneously.
The image is the base layer of the No teeth meme so popular among the internet’s cognoscenti.
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