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Employees Behaving Badly: Lucky Pierre

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In my various career paths I’ve been fortunate to work with a large number of great people.

Conversely, I’ve worked with people who are less than great. Although, and equally fortunately, there have been far fewer of them than the great people.

I’m no stranger to employee dishonesty. I’ve uncovered enough of it and most if it is pretty typical and even kind of dull, in a petty, banal sort of way.

Out of all the people I’ve worked with who turned out to be dishonest one person stands out as being completely unique: Lucky Pierre.

I shouldn’t mention his real name, but within days of his hiring at the electronics store I worked at we started calling him Lucky Pierre, for reasons I won’t go into here, and the name stuck.

What made Lucky Pierre unique was that he was the only person I’ve ever worked with who was clearly a bona fide Pathological Liar.

By pathological I mean that he quite literally never stopped. He lied to customers, he lied to fellow salespeople, he lied to management, he lied to everybody.

And not even low level little white lies, the kind that you’d expect a slightly sleazy stereo salesman to say to customers in order to build trust and rapport, such as lying about shared interests, or the hometown you both grew up in.

No, Lucky Pierre’s lies were spectacular, over-the-top whoppers. The kind that were not only easily proven false, the kind that you’d expect that a socially awkward eight year old with an imaginary friend would tell adults.

In fact, Lucky Pierre was like a modern day Baron Münchhausen, with the elaborate fabrications he told about everything from his work experience (apparently his dad owned Best Buy) to his sports successes (almost getting signed to UFC) to the performance stats of the Chevy Neon he had bolted a ridiculous-looking spoiler to the trunk of (that, he said, beat a Dodge Viper in a quarter mile illegal street race).

When challenged on these assertions, he would back them up with even more preposterous stories.

Needless to say, his time with us was short. He was, unsurprisingly, fired in less than three months.

He then went on to sell cars.

Later I was told by a mutual acquaintance that he had been committed to a mental institution, but, perhaps fittingly, I don’t know whether or not that’s true.

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