Eclecticism

Back when I worked at TimeFrame, I worked with a ‘gentleman’ by the name of J.C. Truly a piece of work, this guy was — I mean, I hate to call the guy a prick, but the only reason he’d ever wear a tie would be to keep the foreskin from snapping up over his face. At one point, he moved down to oversee TimeFrame’s Juneau branch. Apparently not too long after he took over that store, his employees were going over his head and calling the store owner directly to complain about him. He managed to rub everyone the wrong way.

I first met J.C. during my job interview, but I didn’t really get to know him at all until I actually started working there, when he was my shift supervisor. My first day working with him, I hit my break time, and told him that I was heading out back for a smoke break. “No problem,” he said, “I’ll join you,” and we went into the back alley. I pulled out a cigarette and lit it. J.C. reached into his pants, pulled out a pipe, loaded the bowl with pot, and started taking hits.

Two hours into the day, on break, and my supervisor is getting stoned in the back alley. He offered me some, of course — one must be polite, after all — but I declined. Quick tip for employers: this isn’t the best ‘first impression’ for a new employee to get. I formed a lot of impressions about J.C. and the business itself on that smoke break (many of which, unfortunately, were confirmed in the months and years to come).

Of course, to hear him talk, J.C. could do no wrong. Any mistake around the shop was due to the incompetence of the clueless idiots that he had to work with, and he never could understand why all of us couldn’t live up to his example. Needless to say, he was a joy to work with.

Flash forward six or seven years to this afternoon. I’m carrying a stack of copies into the bindery area of the print shop, when I overhear Karen mention J.C.’s name. Not sure if it was the same J.C., I asked her about him, and she confirmed that he’d just moved down from a print shop in Alaska when she worked with him at Ikon a couple years ago. As it turns out, three of the people I work with now had worked with J.C. at Ikon after he left TimeFrame and moved to Washington. Funnily enough, they all have the same impression of him that I do — and, in another stunning coincidence (for I’m sure that’s what it must be), all three of them turned in their resignation at Ikon so that they could move to Xerox on the same day, three months after J.C. started working with them.

I know it’s a small world, especially when you’re dealing with the Alaska/Washington traffic (which seems to flow both ways fairly frequently), but it’s always something of a shock to hear a name from six years ago being bandied about.