29.
“I used to work for this extremely unethical medical device company. The owners had really strong ‘timeshare salesman’ energy, and would say or do anything they thought would make sales or improve their bottom line. As a result, most employees (myself included) got grossed out and left within a year or two, with the only ones staying having something deeply wrong with them, either ethically or professionally. As a result, a lot of shitty behavior was tolerated from senior employees because the owners couldn’t retain anyone else. Enter Bill. “
“In the year I worked alongside Bill, I watched him:
—Ask a brown-skinned coworker how ‘his people’ prayed. Said coworker was born and raised in Maryland.
—In a conversation about how people’s personalities change when they drink, suggested to another coworker that he probably got ‘more autistic’ (said coworker was not, and had never implied to be, autistic).
—During the George Floyd protests, assured everyone in the lunch room that he and his church had an impressive stockpile of weapons in case that kind of civil unrest cropped up in our town.
That’s just the stuff I witnessed firsthand, pretty much everyone had similar stories of Bill.
The straw that finally, finally broke the camel’s back came during a company picnic. We were playing Cornhole, and Bill, unprompted, said very loudly that I ‘should be careful not to throw the beanbags toward [the name of the only two Black employees in the company] because Black Lives Matter’ and then grinned like he’d told the funniest joke in the world. Everyone, including the two employees in question, heard him. Afterwords, as I was explaining the incident to HR, our HR director shook her head and said, ‘This is really bad, you know this isn’t Bill’s first strike.’ Yeah, no shit, Stephanie.”
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