Have you worked at some crazy jobs? I know I have... [Crazy Job 1]
I was speaking with @thebear yesterday about working in Lakewood, Colorado at a Hospice at one point and what happened to that Hospice. He said that would make a good post. I've actually worked at two different places that have made the news. One of them had a 60 minute special done on it about its corruption.
In the beginning: Executive Recycling (Crazy Job #1)
I moved back to the Denver area with my family and was looking for any work I could find. I sent an email for a job I saw on Craigslist for a Recycling Center. I went and interviewed with Executive Recycling and was interviewed by Tor Olson. I had worked for IBM before, I'd ran my own computer consulting business for 9 years, and I'd done ebay work on my own. So when he asked me what I could do for them I basically told him I could repair the computer equipment and other technology (essentially refurbishing), I could work the eBay sales portion (80% of their business at the time), or I could work Customer Service and he was welcome to put me where ever he needed me.
They needed some serious help in Customer Service initially and the first day they had a lady kind of training me on how they were setup. She operated off a sheet of paper she'd doodle all of her notes all over for the day. The second day of work she didn't bother to show up. Guess what? I'm now in charge of Customer Service on my second day. I immediately built a spreadsheet and started loading it up with information. By the end of the day it was already way more organized than it had ever been.
The place was chaos. It had a warehouse with some shredding machines and such for shredding hard drives, a shipping area where they boxed up, wrapped, encased in foam, etc shipments to be sent off.
I started working there a little over a month before Christmas which turns out is one of their busiest seasons. That year a large blizzard hit the Denver area and UPS, FedEx, and everyone were unable to ship everything for several days. This is not acceptable in the eBay world. I handled about 100 calls per day by myself from angry customers around that time. Then Paypal deactivated their account due to complaints. I spent several days constantly working with Paypal and customers and I managed to get the account unlocked. Remember, I hadn't been there even a month at that point.
In the course of the three months I worked there I worked in eBay, Shipping, Customer Service, and in the repair department. I was kind of doing the Jack of all Trades thing. It is the only place I've ever worked at that I did not give notice to when I quit. Let me now get into why...
Part way into that first week I was there they hired a new person named Martha to work in Customer Service. I had worked there 4 or 5 days by the time she got there and all but one of those I ran the Customer Service department. So I hadn't been there a week and I'm training the new Customer Service staff. Martha was a good worker, and I actually would carpool with her and a guy named Josh who had been there for awhile and worked in the eBay department.
A guy named Piotr who was Polish and loved what he called "Polish Techno" and he'd blast it really loud all over the warehouse. I have a pretty extensive music background even as far as being a Dual Physics and Music Major when I started college. This music would soon become the only music I can honestly say I despise. It would often consist of a simple beat on a bass drum in a steady non-interesting pattern, so it didn't have any rhythmic variation, and once every 30 seconds to 60 seconds it might do a slight 5 second digital notes pattern. It was so repetitive that I'm pretty confident I could train my dog to step on a pedal or something and get rewarded for performing that music. I am being serious. It was VERY loud. Even when you were trying to talk to customers on the phone. He had apparently been fired, but I got the feeling he was back because he had something he could hold over the owners' heads. He was pretty arrogant, and incompetent. He also annoyed pretty much everyone there.
They had an employee lounge at one end of the warehouse with a big aquarium style enclosure with a big snake in it. Several times they didn't bother cleaning this after feeding the snake and the next day we would come in and it would smell like death. They would open the big bay doors to air the place out and it was the middle of the winter and that meant it was cold.
Many times I'd be on the phone and hear a large explosion. Piotr liked to get a 2 liter bottle and mix the binary packing foam liquids in the bottle... shake it and throw it. The foam would expand and the bottle would explode loudly. This happened dozens of times.
The final insane thing was when the manager of the repair/refurbishing part of the company, and Piotr were chasing each other around the warehouse with a floppy red tube dangling between the guy in the back of the chase's legs. Laughing and running. The tube (ended up being some medical supplies sent to us to recycle and technically we shouldn't have even had) was full of mercury. So this interesting stream of liquid started running out and onto the cement floor. It pooled up in these nice shiny pools and the beads would roll around in an interesting way.
I went to look up how to clean up a mercury spill because I knew it was poisonous to even touch. I quickly found that anything over a thimbleful was considered a hazardous material spill and hazmat should be called. It was about probably around of a cup (maybe a little more) worth of mercury spilled in various pools around the warehouse.
They shut down the warehouse for the rest of the day and called in a Hazmat team...
The next day they wanted us at work. We could walk around that day and see the little shiny beads of mercury they had not cleaned up properly in cracks between concrete slabs, next to boxes, next to pallets. In other words, it wasn't cleaned up.
Several people complained as by then we knew the health hazards. One guy quit. They didn't close it down and clean it.
So people talk about bad jobs, and I commonly ask them the following:
"Have you ever been sitting at your desk working in your regular clothes while a person in a hazmat suit vacuums around you?"
Before all of this hazmat situation after Martha had been there about a month and a half she gave them two weeks notice. They immediately fired her.
Martha then called me up from her new place she was working and basically said "you would do really good here, you should come work here."
I was offered the job and I didn't bother giving notice. I couldn't afford to be fired for weeks when I gave notice. So I had been there 3 months and they thought I'd been there 6 months because of how much I did in the short period I worked at Executive Recycling. When I did tell the VP Tor Olsen that "today was my last day", he asked why I didn't give notice. I told him that Martha gave notice and they fired her. I couldn't risk not being able to pay my bills. He understood that. He had tears in his eyes, offered to match what the new place was offering, told me they had discussed putting me in charge of my own facility, etc.
I told him "No matter how much you pay me this place is pretty nuts and the stress alone is going to make me have medical issues. It is not worth it."
He agreed with me and that was the last time I was there....
But that isn't the end of the STORY.
60 Minutes does a huge show on Executive Recycling and illegal actions:
At around 2 minutes in they visit an event put on by Executive Recycling. I never saw such an event when I worked there, but when I saw this video I immediately saw some lies from the President of Executive Recycling.
They ask him if the monitors are shipped to China. He denies it.
Yet, I was looking for things the eBay guys could list and there were row upon row of monitors, some of them big, and at a time big CRTs were still worth something. I asked the President Brandon Richter what about the monitors. He told me, "no we can't list those, those are going to China." I didn't ask about the monitors again. Though I did remember the conversation so I watch him Lie in the videos.
Eventually the Feds Raid Executive Recycling...
Here is the Denver Post article on that: Feds raid Englewood recycling company
And eventually Brandon Richter (President) and Tor Olsen (VP) were Indicted and charged
Grand jury indicts owner, former vice president of Executive Recycling
Now I feel like I dodged a bullet. I am glad I didn't take up Tor's offer to eventually run another facility of theirs. When I went to work there I knew the things I worked on well, how to do customer service, how to refurbish computer equipment, how to sell on eBay, etc. I didn't know ANYTHING about shipping regulations so when the President told me they were shipping the monitors to China I didn't think anything about it.
There were some good guys that worked there. Josh was a good guy that was working there because he didn't have any alternative at the time. Martha got in, and got out. I also spent several Friday evenings jamming (I play guitar) with some of the guys from the repair department. That's kind of a funny story in itself...
This post ended up being long... it is just the first of two crazy jobs I've had. I do think this was the craziest and in both crazy jobs I left on my own before the roof caved in. I'll discuss the other one in another post...
I am also going to issue a #challenge to see if any of you have crazier job stories.
Also, if any of you think I am nuts for some of my other posts and that I should be wearing a tinfoil hat. I can claim to have had Mercury exposure. :)
