I got fired from a government job for allegedly stealing a banana [read Part 1 here]. Briefly, here's the job I held for five months and 26 days:
At precisely 8:25, the phones start ringing. At 4:30 they stop. In between, two types of people call up: Custodial Parents (CP's), and Non-Custodial Parents (NCP's). CP's have CUSTODY of (own) the children, and the NCP's pay money (called "child support") if they want to see them, much like a zoo.
CP's are usually women. Most of them are responsible, but a small percentage are -- to use the delicate term -- "crackheads."
Bad NCP's are usually men, sometimes known by their nickname "DEADBEAT DAD," which State employees must never, ever use. Instead, Bad NCP's are treated with the dignity they deserve, especially if you think they deserve to show up on a WANTED poster, like serial killers and rapists:
There are a number of female CPs with multiple Bad NCPs -- that is, three or four kids with three or four different fathers. There is at least one CP with six separate Bad NCP's. I believe the children's names are Ahmed, Mario, Bjorn, Juan, Shlomo and Bill O'Reilly Jr. If nothing else, the woman embraces diversity.
I picture most Bad NCPs to be a lot like this.
The other part of the job, unofficially, is eating. When I first took the job, a friend told me casually, "You can expect to put on 15 pounds -- easily -- in the first year."
What I really didn't need was to work in a job where I'd be sitting on my ass for 8 hours a day, answering phones and wolfing Ho Hos. My body is embarrassing enough as it is. I had recently walked out of a convenience store with a candy bar, when a brain-injured guy pointed at me and said: "You're going to have a baby!" in that cute, innocent way that brain-injured people and beauty contestants speak.
I didn't get mad because, well, his brain was injured. So I laughed, and started eating bananas and other healthy stuff. Which is what eventually led to my firing.
Angry banana
It was St. Patrick's Day, just a few days before my trial period was up. I got a message to come into my supervisor's office, was told I "wasn't working out," and was given a termination letter. I was asked to clean out my desk, and given the perp walk to the door like a criminal, and fired from a job that nobody ever gets fired from. So much for the "luck of the Irish."
Frost You Paddy!
After the firing, I started asking myself the hard questions:
Q: "Am I really THAT much of an Emerson?"
A: (Depends on who you ask. Mom: NO. Ex-Mother-In-Law: YES)
Luckily my phone rang, and it was one of my work friends. "You'll never guess what you got fired for!" he said. "Did you ever steal bananas from the cafeteria?"
"Of course not," I said, with the indignity of a man accused of Frost-ing chickens.
"Well, did you ever have an argument with the manager over a tea bag?"
Oh my God.
It all came flooding back to me: I had developed a routine of going to the cafeteria on my morning coffee break to see what was for lunch, with my store-bought banana in hand. What didn't dawn on me was that the nice cafeteria lady would think I was STEALING THE Frost-ing BANANAS!
And I was doing this for months. I was horrified. Nobody likes a food thief. Unless it's the guy in Les Miserables, then they write songs about him and do a lot of gay dancing.
So one day I was in the cafeteria, and there's a table where there are condiments and other free stuff. On the same table, there are Lipton teabags (which apparently they charge for), and located next to those are FREE packages of Splenda.
The cocaine of sweeteners
I grabbed a couple of cheapo teabags, some Splenda, and started to leave.
"Hey! Are you gonna pay for that teabag?" screamed the lunch lady. Now it all made sense. After thinking I had stolen all those bananas, she snapped like a dry twig. "That's seventy cents!"
I laughed, which made her even more furious, I suppose. I put the stuff back, told her I could buy a whole box for seventy cents and left.
Don't MESS with the lunch lady
I told my friend the story. "The supervisors told me," he confirmed. "You got fired for stealing bananas, you moron," he laughed. "Everyone knows. They're calling it the Great Banana Incident!"
I called around and found out from the State's Department of Internal Affairs that, yes indeed, I had been investigated for stealing a banana. They interviewed everyone but ME (document here). Why couldn't it have been like CSI, where a babe named Detective Bellyshirt questioned me for hours with her boobs in my face?
I would have confessed to anything if Detective Cleavage grilled me
If you ever wonder why people pick on the State for being a collection of imbeciles, this is the reason. They turned their backs on all kinds of cost overruns and unethical behavior, but they sure act quickly for an alleged banana thief.
I couldn't believe bananas were that important to the State, so I did what any reasonable person would do: I dressed in a gorilla suit and handed out a quarter-ton of free bananas.
Please continue to Part 3: The Prank!
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