This was not on the PHR exam

There was recently a post on LinkedIn asking about things that had happened in the careers of HR professionals that the Human Resources certification didn’t cover. It got me thinking and I started to think back over my nearly 30-year career and come up with some (by no means, all) of the crazy sh** I’ve dealt with over the years. Early on, I was fortunate to work with older and wiser HR professionals who got me pointed in the right direction, and sometimes said things like, “Why are you calling me?? Call the police!” So, here goes, in no particular order. . .

• The employee who collapsed and died in the breakroom
  • I was working from home one Friday, when one of the engineers starting calling me on Teams. My role is no longer site HR, so I thought ‘why is he calling me?’ declined the call, and carried on with my meeting with an HR colleague in the UK. Next, he started messaging me on Teams and I thought something must be seriously wrong. Sure enough, he said that an employee had collapsed in the breakroom and an ambulance was called, but they couldn’t find the site HR Manager. I told him to give me 20 minutes and quickly threw my laptop into my bag and made for my car. Thankfully, I had actually gotten dressed that day.
  • By the time I was on-site, the HR Manager had been located and he was ‘directing traffic,’ trying to keep employees out of the breakroom and acting as go-between with the emergency responders. I got online and started managing the corporate leadership; canceling meetings and liasng with our EAP to get a therapist on-site for the following week.
  • In the meantime, the wife of the employee arrived and was shown to a conference room where we tried to keep her calm until her mother and brother arrived from New York City. Around this time, the paramedics informed us that there was nothing they could do; they had worked on him for 30 minutes and had to declare him deceased. They also explained to the HR Manager that they were ‘outside their jurisdiction’ and could not take the body. He was told to call the county coroner’s office and they would manage the situation. Shortly afterwards, a funeral director arrived to work with the family on the situation.
  • As I worked my way through the list of canceling customer visits and meetings for the following week, the HR Manager came to seek my permission. He told me that the coroner’s office had confirmed via phone that they would issue a death certificate and that based on what the paramedics told them, they would indicate it was not work related. However, that was the extent of it. The funeral director, a slight man (about my size – aka ‘petite’) told the HR Manager that the county was terrible at actually turning up. So, we could either call them and insist, and then wait upwards of an hour for response, or six of our strongest male employees could help him lift the body into the hearse. Needless to say, I was shocked and angered by this request. Given that his wife was now sequestered with her mother and brother in a conference room, I could see no other way. To make them wait another hour seemed cruel, so while I was appalled at the idea, I gave my permission for my employees to lift the body into the vehicle.
• The senior level Director regaling me with stories of his sexual exploits while he was separated from his wife.
  • Everyone knew (because he told everyone) that our business head was getting divorced, however it was ‘in process,’ so he was living elsewhere and working through the settlement of the divorce. On one of his visits to my site, he decided to tell me the story of his sexual encounters over the past several weeks. I listened in horror, wondering if he knew that my ex had actually cheated one me. The idea that he thought I was interested and/or wanted to know about how he was effectively cheating on his wife was beyond me. I listened politely and then changed the subject as soon as I was able.
• A woman drunk at work who drove off in her own car after I terminated her
  • This one was early in my HR career. A manager came to my office to say that a woman in the manufacturing area was drunk. I asked him to pull her in, but also cautioned that we had to address behaviors, since we aren’t allowed to ‘diagnose.’ When she arrived, I asked her if she had been drinking and she freely admitted that she had. I explained our ‘zero tolerance’ for being under the influence at work and that I would have to end her employment with us immediately. I asked her to get her things and that we would call a family member to come and get her.
  • Shortly after the conversation, she took off – leaving my office, getting her things and driving away. I called my HR boss and asked what I should do, and he said “Call the police! Tell them there’s a drunk driver on the road.” I was shocked at my own lack of common sense. Of course, if you know someone is drunk driving, you should report it. Why would a work situation be any different? This was a huge learning for me.
• The man who was laid off and refused to tell his wife and family
  • My company had been bought and the new owner had us lay off a large number of staff. I had learned how to do this process, and worked my way through the list as required. One of them was a man with a ‘stay at home’ wife and four kids. He had a notice period, and was coming to work for a while after being told that his job was going away. I had several employees coming to me saying they were concerned that he hadn’t told his family. I could understand why they were concerned, but wasn’t sure what I could do. Sure enough, he continued to pretend to go to work after the notice period, and I had to respond to employees who expected me to ‘fix’ the situation.
• Sitting on an employee’s lap on a business trip
  • During my first business trip to India, we had a layover in Delhi. We had requested a car to take the 5 of us to the hotel, along with our luggage. The trip was a week-long visit to our Indian supplier for software engineering support, so naturally everyone had large suitcases. The vehicle that turned up could fit 5 passengers, but not five equally large suitcases. So, there was an issue with how to fit all of us, and our luggage, in the vehicle. The solution was that I, being the smallest and lightest of the team, would sit on the lap of one of the software engineers. Talk about awkward!
• The employee who was a victim of domestic violence
  • One of our employees had gone off on medical leave because her boyfriend/partner/whatever had beaten her so badly she had ended up hospitalized. The doctor had sent through a release to return to work, but she didn’t turn up on the day she was supposed to be back. Her manager tried to call, but no answer, and turned to me. I had to call the police to ask them to do a ‘wellness check’ and confirm that this ‘man’ hadn’t hurt her again. As it turned out, she had just decided she wasn’t ready to come back to work. I advised her to talk to us, because we were worried about her.
• Cultural differences and Cambodians
  • My company had announced that we were closing our manufacturing site in Vermont. We had a large population of Cambodian employees. My job was to meet with each employee to go over their severance package. In the case of the Cambodian women that worked for us, this became a discussion with their husbands. While it was not normal company practice to allow spouses to come on-site or to sit in on exit discussions, I had to adapt and accommodate the fact that I was dealing with the husband, and not the employee.
• Hunting season in New Hampshire
  • When you live and work in New Hampshire, you realize that the rules are different there. During hunting season, second shift employees would often come to work for second shift straight from their ‘hunt.’ I had a manager from Rhode Island storm into my office one day to tell me that there was a truck in the parking lot with a gun in the front seat! Now, in New Hampshire at this time, you had to display your weapon if you had it in your vehicle. So, the solution was to send out a request to the site – please, if you are going to come in from hunting, put your gun away in our parking lot. No mention of the deer hanging off the back bleeding its guts out.
• Why is men crying a problem?
  • Over the years, I’ve had to ‘let go’ a lot of people, whether through a reduction in force, or performance issues. Somehow, having a man cry in my office is still difficult to handle. I guess it’s because, culturally, women cry all the time, but men don’t. So, for me, when I have a man crying in my office, it’s the most difficult situation I have to deal with during an exit process.
• Where are my babies?
  • September 11^th was a surreal time for the entire country. However, in my position, it meant having to deal with employee reactions (in a Boston suburb where there was direct impact), while putting my own emotional reaction aside. As I worked through that morning, managing on the fly and letting employees go home, I couldn’t respond to my own children. My ex was dealing with his own emotional response to the situation and was unable (unwilling) to go to our children. This meant that I knew my babies (9 and 11 at the time) were being left to whatever the school told them, and there was nothing I could do to change it. My job was to deal with the aftermath and our employees, and put my own family aside.
  • Earlier than 9/11, I was on a business trip when the Oklahoma City bombing happened. My babies were in a preschool/daycare at the Episcopal Cathedral in Harrisburg, PA, very near to federal buildings in the capitol city of Pennsylvania. I had no way of knowing whether this situation was a one-off crazy person, or if state Capitols were being targeted. This was 1995, well before the internet and immediate contact.
• Trump’s America
  • While I was working in the UK and draconian restrictions were being implemented in the US, I had a Muslim general manger that routinely traveled to the US. After a British teacher, named Mohammed, was pulled off a flight for a school trip to NYC, I realized that we could have a problem. My GM was named Mohamed and, though he was born and raised in the UK, his parents hailed from Pakistan. I called the immigration lawyer we used in the US to ask what we could do to ensure his safety when traveling to his business units in the US. He explained that the border is a ‘no-man’s’ land and that until he was granted entry, he was at the mercy of the border guard. He provided his personal cell number, which I passed onto my GM and prayed for the best.

And, there you go, the list as far as I created it one night after leaving work at 19:00 and stopping for dinner (since who wants to cook when you’re getting home after 19:00?)