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Three Bad Employees
My wife Barbara and I were off to our
daughter’s wedding. The trip started
poorly.
I pulled over to the curb at Oakland Airport
whereupon the traffic control officer, Gerald
Boyakins, said, “No curbside check-in. You
have to bring your things in.” There was no
skycap in sight and we had a lot of luggage plus
gifts, so Barbara and I lugged the stuff in. No
sooner did we get inside when Boyakins walked over
to us: “A guy’s about to give you a
ticket.”
With Boyakins close behind, I raced out to find
an officer, G.D. Perkins, just then pulling his
summons book from his pocket. I said to Perkins,
“Thank you, officer. I’m leaving.”
“Don’t you go nowhere!” he barked,
in a tone perfect for addressing an armed
robber.
Perkins ordered Boyakins to stand in front of my
car so I couldn’t move. I pleaded, “But
he told me I had to bring the bags inside. I was
just in there for 30 seconds, and you haven’t
started writing the ticket yet. Please!”
Boyakins, perhaps because he didn’t want to
disagree with a co-worker in front of a
“customer” (me), did not come to my
defense. Perkins started writing the ticket
whereupon a third traffic control officer wandered
over to watch the festivities.
At that point, Barbara came out of the terminal
and saw the trio clustered around me with Perkins
writing the ticket. She pled, “We’re
going to our daughter’s wedding.” Perkins
kept writing. She continued, “Don’t you
people have a heart?” Perhaps defensive about
what they were doing, the third officer snapped,
“What do you mean, ‘You
people’?” (All three officers were
Black.) We were dumbfounded: He was implying
Barbara was being racist. We stood in shock as
Perkins finished writing the ticket and handed it
to us saying, “You wanna fight it? You have 21
days to appear.”
Lessons for Employees
Boyakins knew we didn’t deserve the ticket:
He told us we had to take our luggage inside. He
did not tell one of us to stay with the car. and
indeed he watched the two of us go in. Yet in front
of his colleague, he refused to defend us. He
violated a key principle of the good employee:
ethics first.
Perkins’ errors began with his very first
utterance. He said, “Don’t you go
nowhere!” in a tone that escalated the
tension. In any job, from cop to doc, IRS agent to
technical support person, a cooperative manner is
invaluable.
Despite the absence of curbside check-in,
despite our insisting that Boyakins told us to go
inside the terminal to check in, despite our having
left the car for just seconds, despite knowing that
we were off to our only child’s wedding, and
despite Perkins not having even started to write
the ticket, he chose to issue the citation. He
thereby violated another key principle of the good
employee: think; exercise good judgment. What would
Jesus (or King Solomon or Mohammed or Judge Judy)
do? Would they have issued that ticket?
The third employee (We were too flustered to
notice his nametag) committed the most egregious
error by claiming racism when race had absolutely
nothing to do with the situation. Too often, people
play the race card to gain power in a dispute even
when they know that no racism is involved. In other
cases, people claim racism because they are
hypersensitive to racial slights—perceiving a
statement as racist when it is not. The wise
employee reflects carefully before making an
accusation as inflammatory as racism.
That third employee shouldn’t even have
been there. Already, two employees were ministering
over the issuing of a mere parking ticket. A third
employee was not necessary—especially since
all he did was watch and then make his absurd
racial accusation. He thus failed to fulfill the
good employee’s most basic responsibility: do
your job.
The good news is that after the trip’s bad
start, our trip went wonderfully. When the judge
pronounced my daughter Amy and her wonderful
husband Mike, man and wife, they both cried tears
of joy. So did Barbara and I.
© 2007, Marty
Nemko
* * *
Marty
Nemko holds a PhD from the University of
California, Berkeley, and subsequently taught in
Berkeley’s Graduate School of Education. He is
the worklife columnist in the Sunday San Francisco
Chronicle and is the producer and host of Work With
Marty Nemko, heard Sundays at 11 on 91.7 FM in
(NPR, San Francisco), and worldwide on
www.martynemko.com
 .
400+ of his published writings are available free
on that website and is a co-editor of
Cool
Careers for Dummies.
and author of The All-in-One College Guide.
E-Mail.
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