Another One Bites the Dust

The new Community Manager quit!

My buddy Apache texted me the news yesterday afternoon.

Her first day in the office was Friday September 14. Her last day was the Day of Infamy ─ December 7.

The turnover around here is beginning to look a lot like the White House.

Her leaving is the same old song ... Corporate wanting Community Manager to do one thing, and the Community Manager wanting to please Corporate, keep her job, but not wanting to put herself in the position of doing something she was uncomfortable with that may later come back to bite.

Reminds me of a similar situation I saw a coworker wrestle with at the agency I retired from ─ the agency with the racist CEO.

The CEO ran the place like his own personal plantation, along with an Overseer and various klansmen/klan girls, and they were lying their arses off to federal, state, county agencies about how funds were being used, had been for years, long before I arrived. Nothing lasts forever and so something came to light that caused all kinds of auditors to swoop down on the agency.

Fortunately for the agency, the auditors announced WHEN they’d be arriving, which gave the CEO time to issue the order to shred documents.

They knew better than to ask me, but a coworker who wasn’t part of the klan, but who went along to get along, was told to stay after hours and help destroy documents.

She liked me, respected the way I handled my difficult situation, trusted me and expressed how torn she was .... “Do I do what they’re telling me to do and risk going to jail, or do I not do it and risk losing my job?”

She went with keeping her job, but the heat was on. Auditors smelled blood in the water and kept coming. What they call “findings” were made, which findings indicated all the areas the agency needed to get its stuff together or lose funding.

It must have chapped the CEO that, with all the “findings”, the only thing the auditors found right was my contracts records keeping system, putting in their report that it was “The best seen at any of the agencies they’d audited”.

Though some corrections were made as a result of the negative findings, it was like the Mueller Investigation. The deeper the audits went, the more fraud was uncovered. As the noose began to tighten, the Overseer jumped ship, went to another agency. One by one, the klansmen scattered to the wind, the CEO got scared and retired ahead of a possible indictment. The one remaining klansman, left behind to try to come up with an explanation for past discrepancies through many more years of audits, because he was not able to get a job elsewhere, fell to his death off a balcony (I think it was  suicide). The klan girls are still at the agency, because they’re not skilled enough to get a job anywhere else but, with the demise of the klan, I have on good authority they are no longer displaying those kinds of  behaviors.

At least this Community Manager was smart enough to get out with her integrity intact and before the stress of having to please Corporate/keep her job at the risk of putting herself in legal jeopardy, began to affect her health, like it did the last Community Manager ─ the one who was fired for not pleasing Corporate.

In this day and age, no matter how desperate an individual is for a job, I don’t think Corporate is going to find anyone who’ll put themselves in jeopardy.

So here we go again, without a Community Manager.

As for that former coworker, she got religion, found another job. She and I are facebook friends.