This morning, I woke up at 3 a.m. with a migraine starting. Couldn’t lie still, was miserable. I took 3 advil and laid back down. Andy overslept this morning, so he was late waking me up, but I’ll never fault him for it, we’ve had some long days and late nights. So I had 20 minutes to down another few advil and get my butt on the road to work – only to get stuck behing a train coming from Tropicana.

I get to work with two minutes to spare and I’m fretting about an incident that happened last night after the owner left. I’d talked to a friend @ work about it last night and he confirmed what I knew I had to do. Still didn’t want to do it.

One of the salesguys had come into my office with a handful of invoices that a client wanted collected. We are a commercial collection agency and don’t do personal debt. He wanted me to take the accounts home and work them on my own, out of the system and off the record. He tried to hook me in saying he could get us 40% for them. This would have meant two things: 1) I would have been breaking the law by working as an unlicensed collector on my own and 2) he would be involving me in skimming business off the company for his own personal gain. After 3 or 4 times of my telling him hell no, not gonna happen, he finally gave up and walked out.

I am not going to see my boss and this company screwed over, undermined, stabbed in the back, just because some guy wants to make some extra money. I’ve been here 3 1/2 years and the owner here may be a real bear at times but he’s always looked after me. Even if I was a newbie here, I still wouldn’t let him get screwed over. That’s not my moral standard.

So after the morning chaos slowed a bit, I ended up putting it all into an email to the owner. I told him I am not trying to throw anyone under the bus, as he puts it, not trying to be a whistle-blower, but that he needed to know what this guy was doing.

He called me into his office with a O.O look on his face and asked me to repeat what happened. I did and his only response was, “he’s got to go.” No questions asked, he called the salesman in and confronted him. Salesman fully admitted to it and tried to innocently say he had no idea what he wanted to do was wrong. I didn’t buy it. Boss didn’t buy it. He said, “pack your things and go,” and the guy refused!

Needless to say, it escalated quickly. I ducked back into my office while the owner came dangerously close to physically throwing the guy out. Afterward, boss was just sat there in shock, utterly hurt that this guy he was buddies with couldn’t be trusted. This is the 3rd person in 4 years who has tried to skim business off the company. The first two weren’t caught until it was too late but this one was, so he can be glad of that. I know how screwed over he feels. You can see it in his eyes.