The Good, The Bad, The Ugly: Part VI
You’re reading Part Six of a series. For clarity and flow, start at the beginning. Names in this article have been changed.
Tragedy hits her family, but it’s still a business. I seek outside help to reach final decisions.
In the midst of all of the business-related problems, Sue’s husband (from whom she was recently separated) was admitted to the hospital. It would be three and a half weeks of detrimental pain and despair for his daughters and loved ones. He deteriorated quickly before he passed. Although I was there for Sue as a friend, quietly listening to twice daily updates on his condition, during the rest of the time I had to wear the employer’s hat. With GoToMyPc access, I handled all pending correspondence from Sue’s email accounts and took time to siphon through all the records I did not already have. I set regular backups to transfer to the Florida office computers (rather than solely rely on the backup system in her office). I found many discrepancies regarding time which called into question her work ethic. Sue spent a great deal of time drafting emails to personal contacts, and it wasn’t easy to read messages I stumbled upon in which Sue talked about me as a “poisonous” friend. Oddly enough, much of the wording used was similar to that in Tina’s final email to me.
Deep breath. I had to remind myself that this was not about personal issues - it was business. Pulling the boss hat on tighter, I spent several days analyzing, and found some outrageous billing discrepancies - nearly $30,000 of “lost” revenue simply because she wasn’t analyzing bills each month. Clients who had complained about having sent payments that weren’t applied? I found those payments applied to other accounts.
I did this for three weeks and addressed issues with her upon her return to work. My first task for her was to complete a spreadsheet, asking Sue for information about various accounts and seeking an explanation for any discrepancies. For each item Sue sought to blame me. When I asked why some clients were not billed for services, I was told that Sue did not do that because I had said I’d do the billing. When I asked why some accounts hadn’t been (and weren’t being) analyzed, I was told that since I said I’d do the billing, that meant I’d do the analysis. Keep in mind here that I am not the office manager, and had never portrayed myself as such. I’d been doing everything I could to delegate all aspects of administration.
It wasn’t that I wasn’t sympathetic, nor even empathetic to her recent ordeals. I asked Sue if she needed to take more time. She opted to remain working because, again, she needed the money. She had already taken an extra week off, in addition to what had been taken for her planned abscence.
I asked Sue about various accounts that should be in collections. I could no longer find their balances or past due invoices in the system. Sue claimed that I had told her to delete the invoices and zero out the accounts. I bit my tongue and asked for the backup invoices - she received a copy of each one that was generated through the online system. She said she had deleted all from the prior years from her computer because they were old.
After several back-and-forths, all centering on what I did and didn’t say in phone meetings, I opted to get off the phone and put everything from that point forward, no matter how miniscule a task, in writing. I thought for sure that would garner the proper responses I needed, but even then, she refused to follow my instructions. I would give her a task, for example, such as to update billing a certain way, then hours later she’d reply and say she’d done it a different way because the method I described would take too long. My instruction to redo the work was met with curt answers displaying her irritation and nasty comments like, “If that’s the way you want it, fine!”
I’d seen the light, and my family and friends were happy about this. When I asked why they hadn’t pushed harder, they explained, and rightly so, that I needed to see it for myself, and if I had taken action based on their recommendations, I would have resented them. They’re right.
My husband and I spent a few days going over everything and we both felt completely duped. We had been taken advantage of on so many levels for so many years. We knew that we’d have to let Sue go. I knew that doing so would ruin any possibility of reconciling the friendship, and if this had happened years before, I just might have been stupid enough to try to come up with more ideas on how to make her a good employee. Tina’s actions made me a stronger person, but I still needed reassurance. I worked with my therapist (yes, I have one) and honestly admitted that I had no interest in maintaining a friendship with Sue at this juncture.
Sue might have thought I was trying to make her job impossible. The fact is, I wanted her to be accountable. And why shouldn’t she be? In our conversations she pointed out all these things that I told her not to do, and admitted to things she didn’t do, that one had to wonder, what the heck was she doing each day that she logged full working hours?
I moved to a time-sheet explanatory system - I wanted details not only of time worked, but what was worked on. She ignored my many requests.
During the final weeks, things just got worse. I so hate having to play the bad guy, but I had to put my company, and my family, first. The week Sue returned to work was the last half of a two-week pay period. She logged two-weeks of work and the check was cut (we used a payroll service). When I inquired about it, she said it was done out of habit - that it was a mistake and she’d return the money to the business. I asked her to wait until I spoke with the payroll service because it might screw up the taxes. An hour later she called me, irate, saying that I told her she’d get paid for the three weeks she took off to tend to her husband. Knowing I said nothing of the sort and recalling the conversation quite well via notes and recordings, I said specifically that my husband and I were planning on helping her out some, seeing that she couldn’t work. Sue responded, “I don’t feel comfortable getting paid if I didn’t do the work.” We took that at face value and opted instead to send her personal money after her husband passed away.
Sue called me a liar and said she didn’t like being accused of stealing. I told her that I was not accusing her of such, I had simply found a discrepancy and addressed the issue. She immediately got off the phone, and despite my instructions not to, deposited money back into the company account (once her check cleared, the company sent that money back, as the proper solution was to adjust her subsequent paycheck). Sue’s next step, however, was to let others know that I was accusing her of theft.
After reviews by professionals, it came to light that Sue was signing my name on her paychecks. This, my business advisor said, must stop. There was also the issue of the monthly fees incurred by using the online payroll service, and seeing as I had to sign the checks myself, Sue was advised that her paycheck would now be sent from Florida, directly at the end of each pay period. She argued against this, saying that she’d never get her check in time. The new method would actually get her paid days earlier, but she continued to argue the point. I could only conclude that her problem had nothing to do with when Sue would get paid, but how much she’d get paid.
Sure enough, looking back over payroll records and matching entries against days she’d taken off or only worked half-days, in one year alone, on top of a week’s worth of vacation pay (as well as holidays and pre-approved bonus days off), I discovered 17 days that she was “off” for which she logged hours, with no supporting records or logs to indicate she’d made up the time.
I could have spent endless hours digging deeper, finding scores of discrepancies on time logged and checks cut, but where would that get me? She had no money, so holding her accountable for the previous “free days” would get me nowhere. It was much cheaper (in time and legal fees) to just let it go, and I stopped looking altogether. I also stopped siphoning through correspondence, knowing it would only make me feel worse.
I wanted desperately to call her on her personal actions - to put her up against the wall with words and demand to know why she would tell so many lies about me; to ask why, if she disliked me so much, why I was the one she continued to lean on for comfort? I knew, however, that a good part of my motive would have been vindictiveness - a yearning for her to hit rock bottom in the scope of being a truly bad friend. Sue was not my friend, and though I think at one time her intentions were true, that hadn’t been the case for a long while. Either that, or her most recent ordeals were just too much for her to handle so she needed someone for which she could lash out. Either way, I was the one thrown under the bus, and I’d be damned if I was going to let her antics keep me there. I took the high road and ignored it all during our final conversations, and pledged to move on.
I spent the next few days researching my requirements as an employer, determining whether or not severance needed to be paid and getting paperwork in order. According to NY state’s regulations, there are just more than fifty examples of “gross misconduct” - Sue’s work ethic fell under more than half on the list.
