They say you never forget your first. With romance, that is not the case. I have no idea who the first person I ever kissed was. In my defense, I was pretty shitfaced at the time. That’s pretty much how it went for many of my firsts. So yea, long forgotten.

I make up for this by having other experiences. As many as I can fill my life with. Recently I have had a ‘first’ that I don’t think I am likely to ever forget.

I had my first disgruntled employee.

Relax, not the type that is going to bring a gun to work. Just the guy to send us harassing emails. And I am not even the one getting the harassing emails. I am just being CC’d on them.

Ok, the story in brief.

When I was off one day, my boss interviewed someone. I am of the impression that my boss would hire anyone with a pulse, but that is a story for another day. What matters is that my boss hired some expat living in Budapest. Alright, fair. I got him started with a few students, and did the normal new employee induction stuff that needs to get done. That generated red flag number one – as I explained to him many of the procedures, he complained about all of them. Why did he need to do this, why did he need to do that? I don’t like this, I don’t like that.

Politely, I explained to him that these are our procedures. Nothing we can do about it.

Then I showed him a few ropes regarding other things we use – such as this revolutionary new technology called ‘zoom’. This guy decried it as a ‘passing fad’, and didn’t understand why we didn’t use skype instead.

Skype. Skype, which Microsoft began sunsetting in July of 202. Yup, we should use that instead.

Anyway, we managed to start this teacher off with a few students. Off the bat, it didn’t work out with one of them. He expected the student to change what they were doing based on his schedule. That’s pretty much the opposite of how this should work. He made a second student work for him, and we will get back to this one.

He tried to take on a third student, and after one class the student asked not to have class with them anymore. The student had complained to us personally, and so when he emailed the student directly, she felt embarrassed and denied everything. So we rescheduled a class for them, and the day before, she cancelled again claiming to be out of town. She was in another class the day before, and the day after. Just food for thought.

So now the harassment kicked in fully. He blamed us for what happened, told me he’d rather jump off a cliff than continue working for us, and called us incompetent. Repeatedly. When someone accidentally emailed him, we were called incompetent again.

And the harassment continued for a few weeks after words, with occasional email of abuse towards my boss, and likely towards myself. I kind of relished it.

In the mean time, I had to take over the student he had been teaching. Apparently this guy had been laying in to this student as well, saying a few things that were less than kind. The student was a recent law school graduate, and the teacher had been telling him he was a bad lawyer. Not sure how he came to that conclusion.

Ain’t work fun?