You’re Fired! When nice people have mean jobs

Sometimes really nice people have really mean jobs. Parking attendants, tax auditors, we assume these people are jerks. But often they really are perfectly nice people just trying to do their seemingly villainous job.

Seattle’s Janine, no-last-name-please, is an HR manager for a large company with a household name. Ninety-five percent of her job is spent flying around the country, firing people. In the last five year, she has fired about 100 people. She fires people in Seattle, Nebraska, and the Dakotas.

“One in Alaska was probably the worst one,” Janine said. “I left the location to make a phone call to my boss and the employee exited with a crow bar. He was slapping the crow bar in his hands and staring at me like he was going to attack me.”

Port Orchard’s Wendell Marler used to be a nice guy with a nice job. He founded a nonprofit that takes veterans fishing and he spent 25 years as an auto mechanic.

“Last December, I blew a tendon in my left hand and had surgery and I can’t do that for a living anymore,” Wendell said. “So they moved me behind the counter. Now I’m the guy who calls and says it’s going to be $2,000 to fix your Mercedes. My job description is: I call people and give them bad news all day.”

Wendell’s words of wisdom: don’t shoot the messenger!

“I didn’t buy the car, I didn’t do the lack of maintenance. They’ve been telling you for a year to get this fixed and now it blew up. Well, I mean, I’m sorry. But I really have nothing to do with it. All we want to do is get it fixed for you. But some people get really mad and cuss at you. It’s kind of tough. You know, working on cars and dealing with the general public are two completely different things.”

If you were a troublemaker in high school, you may have encountered someone like Silverdale’s Mackenna Long.

“I am an in-school suspension monitor.”

Rule-breaking teenagers are sequestered to her room for the entire six and a half hour school day.

“They definitely don’t want to come to my room because it’s kind of like being lectured by your mom. They don’t get to eat lunch with their friends. They don’t get to talk to their friends.”

But somebody has to do these jobs and Janine, who exclusively fires people for violating company policy, said she secretly likes hers.

“I go home at night and I’m able to sleep because there’s been very few times when I’ve taken somebody out of a job when they haven’t deserved to be removed,” Janine said. “They’ve put themselves in that situation. Sometimes, and this is an HR manager exclusive, sometimes I get really, really excited doing it because the person really had it coming. They tried to throw somebody else under the bus.”

As for Wendell, he hopes his customers know that he really does feel bad if their car isn’t ready at five o’clock, as promised.

“There’s been times where I leave work and I know a job that was supposed to be finished wasn’t. So the person couldn’t pick their vehicle up that night. I feel bad about it, something out of my control. Something bad happens on a Friday, I will think about it all darn weekend and it will bother me all weekend.”

Mackenna said some of the kids realize she’s giving them the tough love that they need.

“It is hard because I’m a mom. I love people, I want to just hug them all and say it’s going to be OK, here’s some cookies. But I also have to step back and go, ok, wait a minute, we’ve got to get you back on a better track, and then we can give you the cookies.”

Even Janine has found her own way of coping. She says she always wears comfortable shoes when she does her firing.

“I just wear comfortable shoes because I have to be comfortable to be able to be in those environments. I wear the most comfortable thing I can.”