2 Stunning Employee Blunders that Create Fodder for the Water Cooler
Human resource professionals know that employees can have some pretty outrageous excuses for missing work. When employees go so far as to create extravagant stories like what you’ll read about here, you just have to laugh.
One gentleman in Ontario, Canada called police and told them that two men had mugged him on his way to work. He claimed that he had been assaulted and they tried to steal his wallet. His physical appearance would suggest that he was telling the truth: he had a possible broken nose and his lip was puffy (as reported by the Whig Standard newspaper).
Some very obvious inconsistencies began to unfold as police looked further into the man’s story. When pressed for the details and questioned, the man finally admitted to punching himself in the face a few times and then made up the entire story so we wouldn’t have to go to work that day! The man got what he wanted: a day off from work, albeit in prison for filing a false police report. Criminal background searches will uncover his dirty deed for years to come!
One HR professional, and reader of the Web site HRBlunders, tells another story of an employee who lied to get the day off. One of their employees had c at and thought it him as her child. She had covered her cubicle in pictures and tributes to her beloved pet and even took her lunch breaks to be with him. The reader said that she thought it was a “little extreme but to each his own”.
When the employee called the HR Department to report why she would be gone from work, her reason was that her cat had died and she would need the next 2 days off. Then, a few months later, she missed another day of work and had told her co-workers that her cat had died. When she was asked if she had another cat, she said that she did not; she would “never make her kitty share his space”.
The HR Department caught wind of it and busted her for taking unauthorized days off from work and for lying. The funniest part of this story is the HR manager’s reaction: she told the employee that she had to assume that she was lied to about the prior days off unless her cat really DID have 9 lives. In that case, she advised the employee to make arrangements for better planning of her personal days to accommodate her cat’s remaining 8 lives!
Though these are funny stories that entertain us, the sad part is that they are true. From resume falsification to crazy entries found during criminal background searches, HR folks take the brunt of much of these encounters. By using an employment screening service like Accu-Screen, you can ensure that only the best applicants get hires: those who come up clean when criminal background searches are conducted as well as candidates who do not engage in resume falsification.
Choose Accu-Screen today and avoid hiring the “Employee from Hell”!
