The Jordan Harbinger Show
1090: More Workplace Fails and Bad Boss Tales | Feedback Friday
Fri, 13 Dec 2024
When your hostile colleague starts dating a suspiciously perfect man online, do you warn her or let karma take its course? Welcome to Feedback Friday! And in case you didn't already know it, Jordan Harbinger (@JordanHarbinger) and Gabriel Mizrahi (@GabeMizrahi) banter and take your comments and questions for Feedback Friday right here every week! If you want us to answer your question, register your feedback, or tell your story on one of our upcoming weekly Feedback Friday episodes, drop us a line at [email protected]. Now let's dive in! On This Week's Feedback Friday: You work at a brokerage firm where your colleague "Dolores," a self-appointed office manager in her sixties, went from being your mentor to your archnemesis after you made the mistake of pointing out some of her mistakes. When she started gushing about a handsome British architect she met through an online word game, you noticed some concerning patterns. Should you have warned her that she was definitely being set up for a scam, or was it right to let karma run its course? As a rising chef, you notice something off about your new boss's behavior, particularly around tip distribution and suspicious activities at odd hours. When the tips seem inconsistent and large wads of cash appear from nowhere, you start connecting troubling dots. What dark discoveries await? You're a department manager at a supermarket when your elderly janitor calls you in for an emergency with the freezer compressors. Upon arrival, you find him nearly naked, operating the floor buffer in just his underwear, claiming "it gets hot in here." But that's just the beginning of his odd behavior... You're a court reporter at an Ohio newspaper where your editor makes bizarre demands — like covering two trials simultaneously and writing about judicial rulings before they're issued. When you point out these impossibilities, he responds with "That's no excuse!" Where does this surreal situation lead? Recommendation of the Week: Gmail keyboard shortcuts Working under the brilliant but destructive Helga, you navigate an environment where your leader's intelligence becomes a weapon rather than a tool for growth. As she critiques every move and demands constant rewrites without clear justification, you wonder if you can endure the true cost of working under such "genius." At an addiction treatment center run on nepotism, you encounter a CEO's son-in-law COO who exhibits concerning behavior — from inappropriate touching to racist comments. When a coworker is suddenly fired for exploring other opportunities, you realize your position might be precarious... Your boss styles himself as a mix between Tony Soprano and Michael Scott, oversharing personal tragedies within minutes of meeting you. When he reveals himself to be a volatile character who demands employees "die for his company," you start planning your escape. But can you get out unscathed? Have any questions, comments, or stories you'd like to share with us? Drop us a line at See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Chapter 1: What workplace fail is highlighted in this episode?
Welcome to Feedback Friday. I'm your host, Jordan Harbinger. As always, I'm here with Feedback Friday producer, the community service officer directing traffic beneath this broken traffic light of life conundra, Gabriel Mizrahi. And I got my white gloves on and everything. That's right. Going way too hard with the hand motion. Why do they do that? I guess it has to be visible.
Why do they do that? Traffic cops are so extra with the hands.
They are, but it probably kind of... intense. Also, you don't want to get hit by a car. So you got to wave around. You know what it reminds me of? I don't buy it for the record.
No, I think that they're just eating up the stage time and they were like failed mimes or something. And they're like, I'm going to enjoy this. They can't just wave somebody through.
They have to make this like huge theater kid from high school turned law enforcement.
I don't need this prestidigitation. Just tell me where to make a left and let me get on with my life. I don't understand.
You know what this reminds me of? Those North Korea traffic ladies. You've seen those, right, when we were there? Of course, yeah. What's weird about them, not only is it that they don't have traffic lights, that's strange, of course, but the fact that they use these ladies that stand on those little podiums in the middle of the intersection, what's weirdest about that
is not the uniforms, the makeup, the whole thing. What's weirdest about that is they do all of the motions, even when there's like three cars in a mile, and there's no cars in the intersection. So they're still doing it, like as if there's just a full load of cars. It makes absolutely no sense. Just take a break until a vehicle pulls up. 20 cars in Pyongyang that have gasoline.
I mean, that's kind of like the bartender we met in that remote hotel way in the north or whatever. We walked in, there was nobody in the bar, but she's just behind the bar, like on duty waiting for somebody to come in and order a drink.
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Chapter 2: How do you deal with a difficult colleague?
Well, the dots never connected, and the catfish scam took off from there. Still feeling sorry and nervous for this woman, I finally expressed my concerns to a male coworker. When I asked him to be frank with Dolores, he told me, as long as she isn't sending the guy money, let her have her fantasy.
Well, the fantasy ended when the week this British supermodel turned architect hotel mogul was going to fly to the States, he ended up in the hospital. A nurse reached out to inform Dolores that she was this guy's power of attorney. Yeah, because that's how nurses are also power of attorney in hospitals. And they needed a wire of $23,000 in order to perform life-saving surgery.
Okay. So I think you might be a little confused. Dolores, the nurse reached out not to say, hi, I'm a nurse and I'm this guy's power of attorney. She reached out to be like, hey, Dolores, this stranger that you've never met and talked to once on the phone, you're his power of attorney. And also he needs $23,000, which you don't need a power of attorney. Like none of it makes any sense.
It's just all hilarious.
I don't know why I assumed that the nurse was his power of attorney, but yeah, this makes even less sense.
It's just a cheesy romance scam that you really have to have three neurons maximum to fall for.
At that point, she couldn't lie to herself any longer and admitted to everyone, including herself, that the jig was up.
That's actually faster than I would have thought. Good for her. I'm glad she didn't get scammed, even if she is the office busybody.
She confessed she knew it was a scam, but she just wanted to feel important and loved. That's pathetic, but yeah. I had an empathy towards Dolores that didn't exist before. It had to be hard being alone. And all any of us really want is to feel loved.
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Chapter 3: What should you do when you suspect a boss is stealing tips?
Another time, he got $100 more than me. I confronted our chef about this one day, and he said, oh, I'm sorry, I must have miscounted. Won't happen again. He then pulled out a decent-sized wad of cash from his pocket and made up the $100 difference. Okay.
That isn't shady whatsoever. Cool accounting, bro.
Just busts out a rack and peels off a couple Benjis like, yeah, this should fix it.
Hey, don't spend it all in one place. Could this guy be any less subtle about what's going on here? Come on.
At that point, I knew something was up. I was speaking with one of the cash girls in the office a few days later and noticed that the one table where he always counted the money was also the only table in the restaurant that none of the security cameras could see.
I brought it up with the general manager, but he said that he controlled the front of house business and the chef controlled the back of house, so he couldn't really do anything about it.
Yeah, pretty sure that's not true. The manager is probably getting a taste of all this. It's so corrupt.
A few months later, other co-workers started noticing the chef parked in the parking lot really early in the morning and allegedly saw sex workers getting out of his car, then saw him stumbling in looking disheveled and hungover. It later came out that he was addicted to cocaine, gambling, and hookers. Ah yes, the holy trifecta.
All paid for by the hard-earned tips he was stealing from you guys, right? What a mess.
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Chapter 4: How to handle an unethical boss in journalism?
Knowing he's going to walk in. Knowing that his boss would find him in his. Right. Why? The balls on this guy.
That's a level of de-gaff that I personally aspire to. Wow. Yeah. You're right. The yayo helps. I think it does. I think that might be the secret to his success.
All right. Next up. Hello, Jordan and Gabe. Years ago, I worked for an Ohio newspaper covering the legal system. The boss was a psycho who had an affair with one of the reporters and management did not care. In one of my stories, I wrote about a secretary who testified that she found banking records in someone's desk that she thought were fraudulent.
My editor changed it to say that she found wads of cash in a filing cabinet. I was the only reporter in town who covered this story, so my boss pulled this straight out of his ass. I called him out on this at a staff meeting, which really embarrassed him and put a target on my back a mile wide.
I wonder why he did that. Was he just sensationalizing the story? It's a weird choice.
Sounds like it, or maybe, I mean, it was bad enough, but maybe he had it out for this company. He wanted the story to sound worse. I don't know.
Either way, and I'm sorry to keep repeating myself, but yeah, cool journalism, bro.
Just make stuff up. This is wildly unethical. This is a proper newspaper. This isn't some kind of like tabloidy blog being run from Kuala Lumpur with like zero oversight where you can just say whatever with impunity. This is not good. So he goes on. Days later, he accused me of missing an important judicial ruling that happened on my day off.
When I pointed out that I wasn't working on the day that opinion was issued and someone else was filling in for me at the courthouse, he said that was, quote unquote, no excuse. He said I should have written about the judge's ruling before it was even issued. As a former lawyer, Jordan, you would understand that no one has access to court rulings until they are released by the clerk's office.
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Chapter 5: What are the signs of workplace scams?
Well, it's funny you say that because she goes on to say, can't make this stuff up. The mental health field is something else.
It sure is. I guess prostitution is one of those crimes that cuts across all professions, even podcasting, or so I've heard.
Universally beloved. Even people with master's degrees can be drawn to it, too, I guess. So she wraps up, This madness was one for the books. I'm in my own private practice now, and I'm thriving. Signed, Still reeling from the revealing and unappealing things these touchy-feely people were concealing when they claimed to be healing.
You know, Gabe, when I hear about backstabbing at a regressive brokerage firm or criminal behavior in a restaurant kitchen or even nudity on the graveyard shift at a supermarket, I'm like, OK, that's wild. But I could see that that happens.
But when you hear about therapists, people whose whole purpose is helping people, when you hear about clinicians bullying their staff and soliciting sex workers.
Yeah, it's like, what the actual f***?
Yeah, it's just so hard to wrap my head around that. But maybe I'm being naive. I know therapists are human beings too, of course. So maybe the mental health world is just as dysfunctional as any other industry. But I guess it just shocks me. It seems like it shouldn't happen.
It shocks me as well because their training involves, or should involve anyway, a lot of introspection, self-work along the way. Like if you go through grad school to become a therapist, right? And you find yourself, I don't know, cheating on your partner or frequenting sex workers or railing lines during the day or whatever it is.
Yeah, wouldn't you want to address that? That's what I'm saying.
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Chapter 6: How should you respond to inappropriate behavior at work?
Really bad luck. So I'm speculating, obviously, but I'm guessing that was not the only time he did that. And I look, I have very few issues with sex work as long as everybody's safe and consenting and all that stuff, which is obviously a complicated topic. What I find problematic is the idea that a therapist who maybe slash probably has a habit of frequent frequenting sex workers. Get it right.
Yeah. is then trying to treat patients for addiction and dysfunctional behavior. Maybe I'm just a total Boy Scout and a square and everybody be dysfunctional AF and hiring sex workers. I don't know, though.
Maybe our friend here can enlighten us. Also, these people work in the addiction treatment world. And I am starting to wonder if that part of the mental health industry is just a touch more dysfunctional than the others. I'm thinking about the letter we took last week from the guy who wanted to work in the recovery world.
And remember he had a clinic dangle a job opportunity in front of him so they could, they could just keep running his insurance.
And then when they turned it down in our facility, yeah, I think he thinks he's going to get a job, but they're like, no, no, no, we're billing Medicaid.
And then they kicked him out when they couldn't make money off of him. So is this part of that industry just kind of shady? Who knows, man?
Well, Gabe, you know that my mom's brother, the one I've talked about on the show a few times, he was supposedly an addiction counselor and he was also a lifelong heroin addict.
I didn't know that. You never told me that. Really?
Yeah. It's just, you know, and he was an addiction counselor, at least after getting out of prison once he became that. Although now that I think he was such a bullshitter, I don't think any of us know for sure that any of that was true.
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