Why do you lie to me, Jeebs? I hate it when you lie.

I am the trainer of all new employees at work. Part of my duties in this area involves explaining to the newbies what the expectation is for interviewer productivity, and what the consequences are for failing to meet those standards. In my explanation, I point out that a consistent failure to meet the standards is typically caused not by a lack of talent, but by a lack of effort. As such, those interviewers who seem to have the hardest time meeting the necessary productivity rates are not the new people, but the ones that have been there forever.

There is one such interviewer with whom I had a problem this weekend. She has worked there for almost five years now—which is about two years longer than I have.^* She, like a lot of our long-timers, operates under the assumption that because she's been there a long time, she doesn't have to follow all the same rules the 'new people' have to follow. Yes, she's a Princess. Actually, since she's of Eastern European extraction, some of us refer to her as The Tzarina.

Well, I was helping out on the Saturday shift when we got the call from downtown to pull one of the two projects we hadn't finished yet. This meant we had to send home everyone that was on this project, and the Tzarina was one of them. She whined a little about being sent home early. This was no surprise; she whines about pretty much everything that doesn't go exactly her way. As I said, Princess.

Anyway, I was checking the computer a few minutes later to make sure everyone had logged off the project so I could start doing reports. It showed there were two people still on it. One of them was an interviewer who was finishing up a survey. The other one was—you guessed it—the Tzarina.

Now, she usually sits in one of the small side rooms where we have interviewing stations rather than in the main interviewing area. But that particular side room has a couple of large windows, so it's possible to see her station from the outside. And I saw that she was still sitting at her station. She was logged out of the interviewing program, but had not yet signed out for the day. She was, in fact, sitting there reading and talking to someone on her cell phone. She continued to do this for the next two or three minutes, apparently unaware that I was paying attention to her.

There are two problems with this. First, we don't allow cell phones on the call floor. Period.^** Second, I know the owner well enough to know that he'd not be thrilled with the idea of paying someone when they're not actually working. Fortunately, these problems were easily solved. I signed her out for the day.

Sure enough, a few minutes later, she came into the supervisors' office and asked if I had signed her out 'early' for the day. I told her I had and told her why I had. Her response to this was that she had been 'cleaning her station' and that we 'always' allowed people five minutes paid time to do this. Well, yes, we do, and I'd have been happy to do so. But, as I rather pointedly explained to her, she wasn't cleaning. I knew this because I'd watched what she was doing instead. That led to the following rather interesting conversation:

Me: We don't pay people to sit around and talk on their cell phones.
Tzarina: But I was calling here to find out about work tomorrow.
Me: You were calling our voice mail?
Tzarina: Yes.
Me: So, if you hit the Redial button on your phone, our number would come up?
Tzarina: Yes.
Me: All right, let's see it.
[a moment of stunned silence]
Tzarina: No.
Me: Then this conversation is over.

Bluff called.

She came back at me a couple of minutes later with a bunch of talk about "I didn't show you my phone because I don't feel like I should have to prove anything" and "You should trust me" and a bunch of other self-justifying, obfuscatory carp. I just smiled grimly and said, "Look, I'm trying to run end-of-shift reports here. Go home. I've got work to do."

And yes, I know that teaching high school will be a lot of the same kind of thing. Good times.

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^*The fact that she's worked there that long and has never been offered a position as a supervisor really says something.

^**This is one of those policies form which she feels she is exempt, presumably by virtue of her many long years of exemplary service to the company.