Evil People

We all know a few evil people, right? It could be the neighbors who let their dogs poop in our yard (sorry dog lovers, its happened at three different places we've lived and really pisses dh off) or your MIL (not speaking from experience, I just know some people have evil MIL's). In any case we've all run across some unethical bastards in our lives.

Case in point--I know I've talked about this before, but just over 5 years ago dh was somewhat happily working away in Minnesota. We had a nice house, I had a job, we had a baby on the way, and we loved where we lived. Dh had a group of guys from work who all played softball together in the spring and fall, they had poker nights, they had a golf league--there were fun things to do.

So one day dh goes into work and gets pulled into someone's office. Sitting across the table from his was a friendly HR guy (read friendly with dripping sarcasm). "Sorry, John, we have to let you go. The company is over budget and we have to make cuts. Here is a sucky severance package. Best of luck" I'd be surprised if he didn't make a slight kicking motion towards dh while showing him the door. All this came out of the blue for no real reason other than budget cuts.

The place where he worked was over budget and needed to make some cuts. Not so surprising, it happens to a lot of companies. Want to know why this particular company needed to do it? Because it turns out that the friendly HR guy was embezzling money from the company. Yeah, like to the tune of $500K or so. That jerk sat there and fired innocent people to help cut money out of the budget while he was funneling it away for his own use. EVIL! Supposedly he and his wife went to jail for the offense. This happened a few months after dh was let go.

To get the money, this guy and his wife had created multiple fake recruiting firms and would send them invoices for the company to pay them. It is not unusual for big companies like this to hire multiple recruiting firms to help fill open positions, so they didn't figure something was going on.

Fast forward 5 years. The company he was let go from is making billions of dollars (yes, seriously billions)--believe me, they more than made up for the money lost both by the stealing and dh's job/benefits. Drop in the bucket. And the company has a position advertised which is identical to what dh left. Too bad he has more experience and is over qualified for that position now.

Dh had been contacted dozens of recruiters--the e-mail inbox is full of mail from recruiters all over the country. One of the names looked familiar and dh says that is because it happens to be the same name as our friendly HR guy from 5 years ago. Coincidence? I think not. Same name, working in recruiting, in the city where we left. Nice.