Summer Jobs IV

Our story thus far: My company took on two summer hires as part of a make work program, funded by the stimulus package. The original two, Frick and Frack, both quit within two weeks. Frack merely stopped showing up, and Frick quit after telling us that “we wanted too much work” out of him. We then brought in Heckyl and Jeckyl. Jeckyl was a no show on day one. Heckyl has stuck it out for three weeks so far.

When we called the agency administering the grant to ask for a Jeckyl (Mark II), we were told that they could not send anyone else out. The number of people working had already committed the money in the original grant. Given our results, I can only conclude that other employers were having an easier time holding on to their summer hires than we were. At some point I may seek some of the other employers out to find out what kind of results they were getting, and how their treatment of their summer hires differed from mine.

Meanwhile, Heckyl continues to clock in, somewhat to the surprise of the management team. He has only missed two days in three weeks, and he has called in both times. However, this week we did have the episode of the Morning Nap.

We ship our product in gaylords, big cardboard boxes about the size of a refrigerator box. This week we got some in that needed to be wiped down before we loaded product into them. So we tilted them over on their side, and Heckyl was assigned to wipe them out with a paper towels. Simple enough, right?

About twenty minutes later the regular employee who Heckyl is working with went looking for him. He couldn’t find Heckyl at first, until he spotted a foot emerging from the open end of the gaylord. Our guy went around to the open side, looked in and found Heckyl taking a nap at 10:30 in the morning. Our regular employee did what anybody would do in this circumstance: he pulled out a cell phone and snapped a picture of his napping coworker. Then he went and told his coworkers to check it out.

After about fifteen minutes, somebody went and found the Production Supervisor, Big T, and showed him. Big T did what anybody would do in this circumstance. He pulled out his cell phone and snapped a picture of Sleeping Beauty. Then Big T stepped back, had a forktruck fired up, and started shouting for someone to get the gaylords out of the area, while pounding his fist on the side of the cardboard box. Unsurprisingly, Heckyl emerged from the box, claiming that he was still working on this one.

Afterwards, Big T and I discussed what to do about it. Ordinarily, we would just escort Heckyl to the timeclock, watch him punch out, and wave bye-bye as he drove off into the sunset. Since he’s not on our payroll, however, we decided to let him off with a simple warning. I guess we’re no more careful with the taxpayer’s money than anybody else.

The funny thing about the whole situation is this: Heckyl has missed work twice, and been caught sleeping on the job in the middle of the morning. And of the five workforce program guys we’ve tried, he’s the star! No wonder these guys need the government to help them find a job.