Evil Friday: Wishing For Someone's Failure

First of all, this is not going to be a regular feature. I don’t have enough evil in my body to write about it 50+ times a year. I do  have a little evil in me like the rest of you so here’s story for your Friday.

When I managed in the retail world, I managed the biggest slacker in the world. I’m going to call him Menjamin because I wouldn’t want to give away his real name.

He was a dumb kid who was college aged but had no ambition to do anything with his life. He lived at home and he didn’t work that much (because he didn’t want to work full time or during the day). He was content making $9.50 an hour for 20 hours a week doing the bare minimum.

Now anyone who has worked retail knows these guys exist in almost every outlet. Menjamin also brought down every single one of his co-workers to his level (including me, the assistant manager). Fighting this loser on every shift got tiring. I tried sending him home and you can imagine how that went over (hint: he really liked it). Given that we were more bureaucratic than the government, it was nearly impossible to fire the guy for performance reasons.

Now Menjamin was a slacker so he always rolled up late. My brilliant plan was to write him up for coming in late and get him out for misconduct. Nobody else in the store came close to him on tardiness so it wouldn’t be an issue. He was a slacker so it would work. You knew that eventually, the guy would come in hungover and ten minutes late and you’d be able to bust him.

In the first week, our plan worked great. We documented the verbal warning. We gave him a written warning. We gave him a final written warning. “This is it,” I said to myself. “We are finally getting rid of this slacker.”

What happens next? You already know.

The guy shows up early every single day. He never misses a shift. He never calls in. For six straight weeks, I sit in the office and root for him not to show up to work. And every single day, he shows up. His big grin on his face when he clocked in said it all. His overly friendly greeting of “Good evening sir!” rubbed salt in the wound. Menjamin had won. I was rooting for this slacker to screw up just once and in the process had become a bitter, cynical manager. It was the ultimate defeat.

My response to his win over me was measured: I smiled and helped him succeed. And instead of getting frustrated and sending him home, he worked his entire shift (or longer if he didn’t get it done). I stayed with him three hours after one shift to help him do the job he was supposed to complete during his shift. Menjamin grew tired of it the help, the full shifts and the work I stubbornly waited for him to complete instead of letting him ditch work as punishment. He eventually quit and I realized that he was wishing for my failure as well and it became a lot less fun when I stopped cooperating with that.

Did I feel any guilt on wishing him failure? No. He was an albatross around my neck and took up hours I could have given someone else. What I did feel bad about was that I didn’t try to push him to succeed further instead of planning for his demise. The guilt rests in the fact that it took me three months of time to figure this out when I could have approached the real problem head on.

Have you ever wished for failure? Did it work better than this?