It's possible that we ruined Helen, but I suspect that she was already going down that path when she came to us.
Maybe it isn't fair, but I would wonder when a well-dressed woman came in to our filthy trucking terminal looking for a job--I noticed a few potential candidates looking around and trying not to brush their clothes against any exposed surfaces where grease and dirt would accumulate--this would be right before they walked out the door and never came back. The dirt was so bad that I had a set of shoes for work which I would kick off outside the door when I got home to save our carpet from premature aging--my wife thought it was due to some sort of Asian influence. But when the woman accepted the job after seeing the dirt and the truckers coming in and out and knowing what she was getting herself into, it made me wonder why they chose to come here.
For Helen, I chalked it up to simple economics--she lived nearby and she drove the worst car I've ever seen--an enormous, gas-guzzling, buick from the '80's--I think it was originally silver. And it always seemed to be breaking down.
I have to admit that at first Helen seemed more competent than most--nothing seemed to shock her in our strange little company where half of what happened seemed unbelievable: one of the managers was running a theft ring right under our noses--it outraged everyone in the office, but Helen never made a comment. She just kept working quietly in a poorly lit corner of the office area, matching up paperwork and gathering data for government tax reports and billing. She was quick and efficient and tidy.
She never complained about working conditions like everyone, including myself, tended to do--she worked the night shift and the office always felt too dark--especially the small corner desk where Helen would often work. The electricity in the building was weird, so the company on the other side of the wall would turn out their lights when they went home and half of our office would go dark. Maybe it was more irritating that it was just half our office, but that was the way it was. One time I mentioned it to our neighbors that they were turning out our lights every night, and the guy just smugly smiled at me and said nothing, so I let it go rather than giving him the satisfaction that he was getting to me.
And it turned out that Helen was very bright. It was difficult to gauge in our employees as they came and went: our job assignments weren't permanent. Due to some mental instability in the owner of the company which is another story in itself, we would often find ourselves retooling our business procedures to place more emphasis on billing accuracy, speed, data collection, or trying to calculate the efficiency and accuracy of our drivers. This caused us to change our billing procedures multiple times and causing people's duties to be shuffled around randomly.
Whenever these changes occurred, there was usually a chorus of complaints, but none from Helen--she chugged along with her duties for a little over a year, and, despite managing her and giving her directions, I can't remember a single conversation with her about anything personal.
She was a Mexican girl, originally from Chicago, and her accent told me that she could speak some Spanish but used mostly English. Her hair was sort of thin and wispy, jet black, straight, and long to the middle of her back. Her clothes were conservative--she was about thirty but dressed more like she was about forty. She had no family in town, and maybe she made some friends to go out with after work--one of the other girls, it seems like.
After about ten months or so, Helen's work level declined dramatically. I was counting on her doing an important report that she had done several times before, and she blew the deadline with no explanation. In fact, when I went to help her out with the project, it was in complete disarray, and Helen seemed very defensive and upset that I was intervening. I didn't want to embarrass her, so I asked her to work on it for a couple of days and we would get back together. When we met again, she was again almost violently defensive about not getting her work done, and the project seemed to be in the same state of disorder. Since it was a critical government document, I took it over and reassigned Helen to another project.
She seemed to never recover from that.
Over the next couple of weeks, Helen grew bitter and sarcastic. I liked her and thought maybe she was just embarrassed about needing help on the project, so I gave her some space and let her increasing number of snide comments go by me without taking too much notice. Amazingly, her production completely ceased to move forward. Eventually, I had to bring her into my office and gently talk to her about getting over the problem with the report and moving on--she looked, completely confused, as though she had no idea what I was talking about. But no change in her production--I couldn't figure out what she was doing with her time--she certainly seemed busy shuffling papers at her desk whenever I would see her.
So I gave her a couple of days off to collect herself. It still didn't work. It had been about two months since she failed at her project, and Helen had grown unbearably sarcastic and angry, and she had completely stopped doing anything productive at work. She wouldn't tell me what was wrong, acknowledge any problems, or make any resolutions to change. Her behavior was odd to say the least.
Eventually, I had to let Helen go. It was pretty sad, and not something we often did at our little company. There was a lot going on at the time: the company was involved in another lawsuit, we were renegotiating contracts with customers, and we were working with the bank to get increased financing. Getting rid of Helen and posting an ad in the paper were just line items in my list of things to do for the day. And I never saw her again.
About a month later, Helen's sister called from Chicago--she didn't know that Helen had been fired, and she thought we might be wondering what happened to her. I guess we had no way of knowing that Helen had gone missing without a trace for over two weeks. She had apparently suffered a nervous breakdown and left her apartment without paying rent, heading for Chicago. Her car broke down on the highway on her way out of Texas, and she had to hitchhike the rest of the way. She arrived, disheveled and incoherent in Chicago, where they put her in a mental hospital.
Maybe it isn't fair, but I would wonder when a well-dressed woman came in to our filthy trucking terminal looking for a job--I noticed a few potential candidates looking around and trying not to brush their clothes against any exposed surfaces where grease and dirt would accumulate--this would be right before they walked out the door and never came back. The dirt was so bad that I had a set of shoes for work which I would kick off outside the door when I got home to save our carpet from premature aging--my wife thought it was due to some sort of Asian influence. But when the woman accepted the job after seeing the dirt and the truckers coming in and out and knowing what she was getting herself into, it made me wonder why they chose to come here.
For Helen, I chalked it up to simple economics--she lived nearby and she drove the worst car I've ever seen--an enormous, gas-guzzling, buick from the '80's--I think it was originally silver. And it always seemed to be breaking down.
I have to admit that at first Helen seemed more competent than most--nothing seemed to shock her in our strange little company where half of what happened seemed unbelievable: one of the managers was running a theft ring right under our noses--it outraged everyone in the office, but Helen never made a comment. She just kept working quietly in a poorly lit corner of the office area, matching up paperwork and gathering data for government tax reports and billing. She was quick and efficient and tidy.
She never complained about working conditions like everyone, including myself, tended to do--she worked the night shift and the office always felt too dark--especially the small corner desk where Helen would often work. The electricity in the building was weird, so the company on the other side of the wall would turn out their lights when they went home and half of our office would go dark. Maybe it was more irritating that it was just half our office, but that was the way it was. One time I mentioned it to our neighbors that they were turning out our lights every night, and the guy just smugly smiled at me and said nothing, so I let it go rather than giving him the satisfaction that he was getting to me.
And it turned out that Helen was very bright. It was difficult to gauge in our employees as they came and went: our job assignments weren't permanent. Due to some mental instability in the owner of the company which is another story in itself, we would often find ourselves retooling our business procedures to place more emphasis on billing accuracy, speed, data collection, or trying to calculate the efficiency and accuracy of our drivers. This caused us to change our billing procedures multiple times and causing people's duties to be shuffled around randomly.
Whenever these changes occurred, there was usually a chorus of complaints, but none from Helen--she chugged along with her duties for a little over a year, and, despite managing her and giving her directions, I can't remember a single conversation with her about anything personal.
She was a Mexican girl, originally from Chicago, and her accent told me that she could speak some Spanish but used mostly English. Her hair was sort of thin and wispy, jet black, straight, and long to the middle of her back. Her clothes were conservative--she was about thirty but dressed more like she was about forty. She had no family in town, and maybe she made some friends to go out with after work--one of the other girls, it seems like.
After about ten months or so, Helen's work level declined dramatically. I was counting on her doing an important report that she had done several times before, and she blew the deadline with no explanation. In fact, when I went to help her out with the project, it was in complete disarray, and Helen seemed very defensive and upset that I was intervening. I didn't want to embarrass her, so I asked her to work on it for a couple of days and we would get back together. When we met again, she was again almost violently defensive about not getting her work done, and the project seemed to be in the same state of disorder. Since it was a critical government document, I took it over and reassigned Helen to another project.
She seemed to never recover from that.
Over the next couple of weeks, Helen grew bitter and sarcastic. I liked her and thought maybe she was just embarrassed about needing help on the project, so I gave her some space and let her increasing number of snide comments go by me without taking too much notice. Amazingly, her production completely ceased to move forward. Eventually, I had to bring her into my office and gently talk to her about getting over the problem with the report and moving on--she looked, completely confused, as though she had no idea what I was talking about. But no change in her production--I couldn't figure out what she was doing with her time--she certainly seemed busy shuffling papers at her desk whenever I would see her.
So I gave her a couple of days off to collect herself. It still didn't work. It had been about two months since she failed at her project, and Helen had grown unbearably sarcastic and angry, and she had completely stopped doing anything productive at work. She wouldn't tell me what was wrong, acknowledge any problems, or make any resolutions to change. Her behavior was odd to say the least.
Eventually, I had to let Helen go. It was pretty sad, and not something we often did at our little company. There was a lot going on at the time: the company was involved in another lawsuit, we were renegotiating contracts with customers, and we were working with the bank to get increased financing. Getting rid of Helen and posting an ad in the paper were just line items in my list of things to do for the day. And I never saw her again.
About a month later, Helen's sister called from Chicago--she didn't know that Helen had been fired, and she thought we might be wondering what happened to her. I guess we had no way of knowing that Helen had gone missing without a trace for over two weeks. She had apparently suffered a nervous breakdown and left her apartment without paying rent, heading for Chicago. Her car broke down on the highway on her way out of Texas, and she had to hitchhike the rest of the way. She arrived, disheveled and incoherent in Chicago, where they put her in a mental hospital.
When things like this happen, it's pretty normal to replay the events in your mind to see if you could have done something differently to prevent it. There were a lot of people at that company who I took a personal interest in, got to know, or gave extra help to beyond what they deserve. Maybe I even tried doing this in Helen's case--I don't know if I could have done anything to help her out--my assessment of her poor work, and my decision to fire her certainly added to her stress.
Would I have lent her a hand if she called, stranded, from the road? I don't know--I would like to think I would. Don't get me wrong--I'm not naive enough, or so self-centered as to think that my actions were the main cause or held the ability to prevent her breakdown.
But little things seem to count, and I sometimes wonder if I could have (should have) seen all this coming if I had looked a little harder.
1 comment:
hemm...this is an interesting situation and I think it happens to alot of people. Many stick to a strict rountine that when something goes wrong, they just flip. I imagine that you could never have seen that coming, sometimes they just never reveal. Maybe if you pressed harder or got a female to talk to her, then maybe the real story would have been known.
There are ways to check if ppl's lives have changed dramatically, their eating habits, their timing and also their communication to outsiders (outside the company). If you notice someone who talks on the phone normally stops doing that, then there are signs of some personal problems...
You are just doing your job, and if you have knows earlier, you would have saved her./
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