As you may have noticed from reading my blog posts, I have a lot of stories to tell.

At least to my mind, the best stories are the ones that are funny, and the funniest ones are the ones that are at least a little scandalous.

With a long career in retail, I’ve worked with a lot of people. Most of them were good employees, but inevitably some of them were bad employees.

Here’s the thing about behaving badly: sooner or later bad behavior catches up with you.

I’m not talking about boring old petty theft; I’ve seen plenty of that, and it’s seldom been creative enough to merit talking about, although there was one co-worker who was terminated for keying in his own Aeroplan Miles number on customers’ multi-thousand dollar big ticket purchases (he got away with it for over a year!).

No, to my mind, what really sets gold-medal performances as Employees Behaving Badly is really exceeding all expectations when it comes to aberrant behavior, and old-fashioned chutzpah. You really have to OWN the role. Here’s one such story:

It’s tough being the new guy hired on a cut-throat sales floor.

It’s even tougher if you’re weird.

At the furniture store I worked at, they hired a new salesman — I’ll call him “David,” a middle aged guy with an allegedly strong professional pedigree, including management experience at a major global retailer.

I say “allegedly” because none of us ever saw any evidence of professionalism or expertise. From his awkward social manners, to his bizarre behavior with customers, he was just “off.”

I say this with no malice, but he acted like somebody who had suffered a traumatic brain injury.

In retrospect, I feel sympathetic, but at time working with him was aggravating.

Whatever his faults, he was earnest though. The greatest example that ties together both his earnestness and his cluelessness was the incident where a customer had fainted and was weak and disoriented. Store security had provided first aid and called an ambulance, but in the meantime they’d parked her on one of our sofas and made her comfortable.

Seeing her in our section, David jumped her, and despite the fact that she was delirious and non-responsive attempted to sell her a sofa.

I’m not kidding. He even went so far as to show her fabric swatches.

David left the company shortly thereafter.