Just Off Center

Coworker Carl is lying to me and I have decided to finally call him on it. For those who are unfamiliar, Carl is the guy in my office who is responsible for all non-technical logistics at my site. Basically that means he does the scans and goes around transporting equipment from one room to another. He’s basically a goon. He comes from south Phoenix, which is hailed as the most ghetto of the black ghettos in the Phoenix area. But he now lives in a ghetto-minor in the West Valley. He reckons himself an intelligent man. And while he may have more deductive reasoning skills and general knowledge than most of the residents of his current and former neighborhood, he is still far less intelligent than I am, and also most of my coworkers. But he doesn’t know this. In his mind, he is able to fool and deceive all of us with ease.

Carl has been featured on this blog before as the mulatto family man who routinely cheats on his wife with white girls who only date black men. These women are mostly skanks, but that shouldn’t come as a surprise. He spends several hours of his day, some during company time, managing a small youth football league in his ‘hood. And while I try not to judge people for their lifestyles, I have to admit that he is selling himself far short of his potential. For that I say cut him loose. At any rate, I haven’t had any problems with Carl personally until these past few days.

With the new year came a major organizational restructuring in my company. Our supervisor has been moved to another site and given a new job title. The other site’s manager has had his scope expanded to now include our site. So now all operations have been consolidated under a single manager. And now, aside from coworker Richard, our engineering specialist whose position doesn’t usually involve us, Carl and I are alone in this office. In other words, we are without physical supervision. This has been my first week back at my home site since Ft. Wayne. And I can already see that Carl is acting like a twelve year old whose parents have left town for the weekend.

Carl shows up late for work nearly every day. And by late I mean an average of 25 to 30 minutes. His most common excuse is that he has such a long drive in that he gets caught in traffic on the highways, especially if there’s a wreck. This pisses me off because I live just as far away as he does in the opposite direction and I am an average of ten to fifteen minutes early every day. I give myself about ninety minutes to get to work because I see lateness as one of the biggest signs of disrespect one can show. Another one of his moves is to show up late, go to a lab, grab an action of some kind or have a conversation, and run into the office spouting off how he was on time, but he’s been in the labs working. Today Richard and I decided to keep our eye on the window facing the parking lot to watch him come in. He’s supposed to be in the office at 8:00. He pulled in to the parking lot at 8:25. When he came in, I asked him if he got stuck in traffic. He got all defensive and said that he’s been here for a while.

MIKE: No, Carl, you weren’t. You just got here.
CARL: Uh, YEAH! I was here. What, you don’t believe me?
MIKE: Actually, I tend to believe my own eyes. I just saw you pull into the parking lot two minutes ago.
CARL: Well yeah, I went out to get some coffee at the gas station.
MIKE: Are you suggesting that you got here at 8:00, left to go get some coffee at a gas station, and then came back?
CARL: No, I’m saying that I don’t like the cafeteria coffee, so I stopped for some.
MIKE: OK, so you admit you weren’t here.
CARL: Maybe not here, but I was nearby. You could’ve called me if you needed me
MIKE: Right…but 8:00 came and went and you weren’t here.
CARL: What!? I might as well have been here. I was just down the street.
MIKE: But…you…weren’t…oh fuck it. Nevermind.

It goes on and on like this. Carl will never back down. He will never admit he was wrong. He will lie and lie, and if he’s caught lying he’ll just keep the lies coming. And if you corner him in a lie or question him about anything that he did wrong, he’ll go on the attack to get his accuser to back down. He’s a real reactionary like that. I bet that most businesses have a shitbag like this.

Anyway, one of Carl’s jobs is to scan all of the equipment in the building with a portable barcode scanner every month. It’s about 4,000 pieces of equipment, so that’s a goal 1,000 per week that we have to report to our boss. I try to help him whenever I have some time…and I feel like helping. On Wednesday I was preparing to go scan a lab of about 200 pieces and Carl stopped me saying that he had already scanned this whole section of the building the previous afternoon. I already knew this was a lie because he had disappeared between the hours of one and four, his scan gun was sitting unused on his desk and all three equipment carts were in our office. No scan gun = no scans. But I humored him.

Yesterday when the time came to upload all of the scans into our database Carl was nowhere to be found. Once again he was gone with all of his tools still in the office. Oh, I forgot to mention that he never answers his phone when he disappears like this. Somehow his phone is the only one in the company that just doesn’t ring. When he came back I was uploading just the scans that I had done. He started searching frantically for the scan card that should have stored all of those scans he said he did. Weird. Somehow the card couldn’t be located. It was quite an act. The Academy would have been pleased. Turns out I had all three scan cards with me. And oddly enough, there were no scans of any kind on his. He was busted, basically.

Did Carl just admit that he didn’t actually do any scans? Fuck no; he’s too smart for that. He’s going to tell more lies to us stupid little coworkers. We’re too dumb to know the difference. He told me there was a fourth card somewhere. Then there wasn’t a fourth card because I busted him out on his gun being at his desk. Then there was also a fourth gun. The there wasn’t a fourth gun because I pointed out that we only have two working batteries for the guns and both were here. Then he said that Richard must have erased the scan file of his card. Now this is just desperate, because Richard simply will NOT tolerate an accusation like this. But that’s not true either, because I had already downloaded all of the files from that card and showed him that there were indeed scans on it, just none from him.

Now he’s all out of bullshit excuses. So he starts attacking me. All the while I’m trying to appear like I’m on his side, but that I just can’t make sense of the evidence. Data has never simply disappeared. But then there are a lot of things that happen to Carl that somehow have never happened to anyone before. So he just starts throwing a fit saying, “Fine, I guess all day Tuesday was just a figment of my fucking imagination!” and “I guess I dreamt the whole thing!” No you didn’t, Carl. You made it all up. Save that self-pity and self-deprecation for the bitches. It doesn’t have any impact on me. Now he starts saying, “Guess I’ll just go scan everything AGAIN! Great! I can’t wait to go to Frank and tell him that I need to be escorted around his lab for a second time this month.”

Excellent! Carl has just pointed out, by name, that there is another person who can corroborate his story. So this morning, on a routine equipment deliver, I just happen by Frank’s desk.

MIKE: Hey Frank. Happy New Year…blah blah blah. So remember when Carl came by on Tuesday afternoon to inventory your lab?
FRANK: He did?
MIKE: Yeah, he said that he came by and asked you for an escort. Didn’t he?
FRANK: News to me.
MIKE: Huh. I must have heard him wrong. Anyway, there was a problem with the upload…blah blah blah.

So now, we’ve got him caught in yet another lie. And this is where I am right now. We didn’t meet our goal of 1,000 scans this week and Carl is lying through his teeth (and badly I might add) about everything he had been doing between the hours of one and four both Tuesday and Wednesday. I don’t understand why he would lie to me at all. I’m not his boss. I’m not a rat either. If he has some shit he has to leave the site to go do, all he needs to do is tell me so that I can cover for him and vice versa. Whatever the reason, I can’t abide being lied to. Given the whole Internet debacle, I’m inclined to offer a second chance, since I was given one. But if I have to put up with any more lies, I might just have to suggest to our manager that he pull up the turnstile records for his entry card. I’m not the only one who finds tardiness to be an intolerable practice.

UPDATE: He just got back from Frank’s office and is now retracting his statement about not wanting to tell him that we have to be escorted again. I guess I was hearing things. He also wanted to know who else I had talked to about this. Gee, I wonder why? But did he just give his bullshit lie and walk away? Of course not. He also dropped the names of two other people who supposedly escorted him around. I guess I have a couple more casual conversations to have in the next couple hours. I wonder if they’ll develop amnesia too.