I didn't know Tom too well, although he had worked under me on the project for six months. We were both about the same age, late 20s, but we were from different offices, and things had been so hectic that we had been working 18 hours a day and snatching as many hours of sleep as we could.
Finally, we got caught up, got the project staffed up, and the programmers were cranking away. Things were going fantastic, and as we were able to return to normal eight hours days. It felt like a vacation.
I had time then to get caught up on job administration. On a lazy Friday afternoon, when all the clients and most of our staff had already left for the day, I wrote a little excel macro to analyze the expenses my staff had turned in, and that's how I caught itβTom was double charging the project for a lot of travel expenses: airfare and car rental, mainly.
It had been going for nearly the entire time he had been on the project. He was directly charging the expenses through the firm's travel agent, and then he was also charging in the receipts on his time reports. He was subtly altering the amounts and the dates, so they wouldn't exactly match the expenses that were directly captured. I guess he thought he was pretty smart, and maybe most project managers aren't as anal about the expenses as I am, but early in my career I had a client who went over the expenses with a fine-toothed comb, and the unpleasant experience of being caught in a mistake had seared my soul for eternity.
So, I had to fire him. It was crystal clear.
I called him in, and told him straight out that he was a thief, and that he was fired. I told him the firm's lawyers would decide whether to press criminal charges.
He cried. He wept like a baby. He begged me to give him a chance to make it right, and to repay what he had stolen.
I was hard-hearted. I hate a thief. I kept telling him, no, no, no. But then, said something that caught my ear: he said, you can have anything you want, you can have my girlfriend!
I had been working so hard for so long that there had been no nookie whatsoever in my schedule. I vaguely remembered seeing his girlfriend, who, I gathered, traveled to the job location every weekend to see Tom. She was a lot older than he was, I recalled, and pretty slutty looking.
"What do you mean, I can have your girlfriend," I said.
"I mean, you can fuck her whenever you want," he answered. Well, that was pretty clear.
"Why, how, what the hell is going on that you can say that?" I demanded.
Tom looked extremely relieved. "You can fuck her however, and whenever, and wherever you want," he said.
"What the hell are you talking about," I asked.
Now he was smiling a little. "Bambi and I have a, well, a special relationship. Trust me, you can take this to the bank."
"You're full of shit, you scumbag thief," I said.
"Ok, don't believe what I'm saying, but come over tonight and see for yourself."
I thought it over. This was so bizarre.