Help! I'm surrounded by crooks!

You may have been around when close to a year ago I wrote about a debate that broke out in the Fitzsimmons call center about whether it was ethical for a Fitzsimmons store manager to add a customer's "lost" Orange ePhone phone to his account, when he easily had the means to find the rightful owner. (Yes, amazingly some of my co-workers thought there was an argument to be made for his actions.)

A little later I told the tale of a co-worker who mused that because crack didn't show up in urine tests (so she said) but marijuana did, it appeared employers preferred crack users. My latest tale of crime and intrigue in the call center centers around this girl.

Yesterday as I was on a call, the girl who sits across from me motioned for me to stand up. I pointed at my headset to indicate I was on a call, but she seemed adamant that I come closer because she had some really big news to tell me.

"Did you hear about LaShawn?," she whisphered. No, I hadn't. "She got fired! I heard it was something about a felony and $8,000 and she was wearing an ankle bracelet or something!" She said we should take anything we heard with a grain of salt, though, since this was all fifth-hand rumor.

My friend Grossman had the real story, though, because he had heard about this ongoing concern a long time ago and looked it up on Yahoo!. The story was that this co-worker was involved with a disreputable tax preparer who was making up phony income statements for her customers, showing employers they never worked for, salaries they never earned, scholarship credits they never qualified for, and most disturbingly, dependents they had no relation to (we spend 40 hours a week staring at names, addresses, birthdates and Social Security numbers; this girl would've had free reign to pilfer any of that info). The idea was to inflate their income to Uncle Sam so that their tax refund would be bigger. This is dumb as hell, because if you've ever used Turbo Tax you know the government already knows where you work and how much you've made, this exercise of sending in a statement once a year seems more like a check of your honesty. He said our former co-worker's job was to solicit new customers for this B.S.

I also looked it up, and sure enough there it was: she entered a guilty plea in February 2008 in federal court (the crimes happened in `03 and `04) and could've gotten 10 years in prison, but for some reason instead was still working in our call center.

Here's the other kicker: she was in the management training program! Yes, the program I got turned down for.

So again, I've got about zero respect for the managerial skills of the folks at Fitzsimmons. How in the hell can someone enter a guilty plea in federal court, and you've got them standing there working with people's Social Security numbers all day? And even pass over a guy in a polo shirt and khakis with a college degree for this idiot with her name tattooed on her arm and two illegitimate kids who turns out to be a convicted felon? Brilliant work, Fitzsimmons!

But I guess stuff like that happens where you guys work every day.