I hired a guy to be a production manager over our grout mixing machine product. He came with a pedigree of doing this at other places. I didn’t check him out, just trusted the resume.
He did have interesting ideas but soon it became evident: He liked to sit and talk –alot. He did not want to start helping cleaning up the bill of materials (primary job responsibility). (did absolutely nothing along those lines) He wanted us to farm things out to his buddies (like have fastenal kit the nuts and bolts, have this other company make your sheet metal for you). OK, was trying to absorb ideas and suggestions. After all he was over building all the production equipment at the local Purple Mattress factory (or so he said). I expected him to help task employees in his department, but soon when asked where they were and what were they doing, he had no idea. I gave them a task to modify a mounting fixture by cutting it and inserting 10” of steel tubing. Rather than have them do what I asked, he took new steel and made one from scratch. So he wasted the steel, his time and he used too thin of material. Took two hours. I told him you could make the modification in 10 minutes, he argued that point. So I took a stand, cut it, extended it, using a stopwatch. 3 minutes 43 seconds.... When I complained about it, he said that my fixtures were too weak and they were going to kill someone. I demoed one with about 10X load not failing. Then he started complaining about other things, deflecting that he did not do what I asked and did something else wasteful and substandard. Interspersed with my request was not clear and he didn’t understand what I wanted... He said my repair to a air compressor was unsafe. He said he got arc flash in his eye from a distance of about 60 feet, etc etc. Had to buy stuff to build safe welding stalls, etc etc. So I made a casual comment to my son (who is taking over) yesterday: “you know, when a guy like this leaves a company whether fired or not, they sometimes call OSHA just to cause problems” Then I actually listened to my own words and agreed with myself. Late in the day this problem employee said to me: “I guess I am going to have to ignore my own exceptionalism to be able work here”. That bugged me the longer I thought about it. I fired him via email about an hour after he left... Made it one full week and a couple days the prior week. He can bless someone else with his exceptionalism. AITA?
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