Oh, yay, another chance to tell a story! Come, children, come gather around the fire, Uncle Garrett has another tale to tell!
I was a manager at a call center back in the early-2000s. I'm not sure about other countries, but in the USA, call centers tend to hire people with very few qualifications, which tends to be a lot of high school dropouts, people with little ambition, etc.
At one point, we hired a mother-daughter couple; mom was about 40, daughter about 20, and I should point out: at this time, I was about 30. Things were entirely normal at work for a period of time, during which the mother was directly under my supervision, while the daughter was on a different team but I would still interact as necessary.
But, one day I was surprised when, after I gave the mother a bad review, I was called into Human Resources. Bad reviews were pretty commonplace, and being called into Human Resources wasn't that uncommon, so I had no idea what was coming. But, as I sat there and began talking to the HR Director, it dawned on me that something was very, very wrong.
The mother had gone to HR to complain that I had given her a bad review...due to the fact that I was dating her daughter and they were currently not on speaking terms.
I should probably point out that at this point in time...I'd been married for a few years. I had not dated the daughter, nor had I done anything remotely similar, never even seeing her outside the office. I had no concept of what was going on and was extremely confused.
So, we decided to clear things up. First, we called in the mother to meet with me and the HR Director. We chatted for a few minutes and it became clear that something was really, REALLY messed up. This woman reported that I had been dating her daughter for several months and that yes, I was retaliating against her on her daughter's orders. We tried to clear things up and realized that we were getting nowhere, so we let her get back to work and brought in the daughter...and now we had her answers.
You see, it seems that when the mother and daughter started working there, both of them became a little, er, fixated on me. Both of them were talking about me and how much they'd like to date me, and apparently they became more and more competitive about it. Completely unknown to me, they would each be making excuses to talk to me at work (I was clearly pretty naive about this). Well, after weeks of this, the daughter decided she would end the competition the easiest way possible: she told her mother that we had started dating. She found ways to mimic an entire relationship: a date every weekend, cute text messages (we were a cell phone tech support system and she used our system to send herself the text messages), and she even sent herself a dozen roses...from me...to the office.
Sadly, I exploded on this poor little girl, but it was entirely justified. My job and my marriage had been put in jeopardy by this petty disagreement between mother-and-daughter and I was livid. We had to have another meeting with the mother, where the HR Director and I explained our findings with her and she finally accepted things.
After all this, I talked to a couple employees that I'd known for a long time and confirmed that yes, the rumor around the office was that I'd been dating the daughter, and many of the girl's co-workers had seen the roses and knew I'd sent them.
The daughter left the company almost immediately on her own out of embarrassment, I'm sure, and the mother left not long afterward. It honestly took longer for the rumor mill to shut down than for their careers to end.
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