Steven Colucci
I worked a few temp jobs as I was trying to ease my way out of the mortgage industry. I even temped at the bus company that runs all the busses for Phoenix (that’ll be another story). I finally settled into an Internet Technical Support position at the University of Phoenix Online for Apollo Group, Inc. The Online campus was building full of Enrollment Advisors (sales drones) and other support personnel – no students.
Working for Apollo was nice, they had great education benefits, and the people I worked with were mostly great folks. I’m still friends with a handful of them - a decade later.
It was their product I wasn’t interested in. I had a student on the phone one day who was a Chief Information Officer of some corporation, possibly ATMI. He was in the last few classes to finish a master’s degree in Information Technology; he still needed help from his secretary to send an email. Doing internet technical support, I learned students would get out as much out of the program as they put into it. By putting forth the effort as student could glean as much knowledge as they could. The students that were lazy, or had their secretary do all the work, would render them to be the same idiot they started as, only with a degree and a few thousand less in net worth.
The Chairman and founder of Apollo, John Sperling, a creepy old man whose biggest goal was to clone his dead dog Missy, and legalize marijuana. He would come around, walking in looking like a bum off the street spelling like stale Aqua Velva.
Tech Support involved long hours tethered to phones in tiny three-sided non-cubes. We referred to them as toilet stalls. Day shifts could be insanely busy, and we could be required to spend a minimum of 7 hours a day in the queue on the phone with people. Nights were a tad slower, and with less supervision we could screw around a little. That might involve playing online golf. Weekends were even slower, and we filled that time with small pranks.
About six months into tech support, I got called up to the Campus Systems Administration (CSA) department. Most of the people we supported were nice people. However, there were a few people that made our naughty list.
Steven Colucci was a smarmy marketing guy who smelled like day-old date-rape. He was the type of guy who found a way to get every possible cell phone feature AT&T had available turned on, creating an $800/month cell bill. Management found out, and everybody had their cellular service audited. In IT we had our phones stripped in favor of pagers. Some of the features he enabled were not even available for his cell phone, but AT&T was still happy to charge for it. This was typical marketing department behavior. They where the most important people in the company – just ask ‘em, they’ll tell you all about their importance.
While on a business trip Colucci admitted to spilling beer on his laptop. The laptop stopped working. So, he called the laptop support person in wee hours of the night. He told her that she needed to get his laptop fixed as soon as he gets to town. He was due in a few hours. She had some sort of family thing planned, but he forced her to cancel, to service his laptop. During the process he had her in tears about providing support and threatening to call a vice president on Monday.
He had claims of important business stuff and deadlines. He bragged to a coworker that he wanted to get a bid in on eBay on time. It got back to our department, and we swore to make him pay.. If our manager lodged a complaint about his behavior, and how it was over an eBay auction and spilling beer on his laptop it would have been buried, and nothing would have been done. In IT we took care of our own problems.
We had a constant workload of moving people between buildings and/or departments. The big moves were recommended by organizational consultants were large and involved our whole staff and a dozen or so temps.Because of the complexity of these large moves Helen the facility manager would send emails to managers and employees with expectations each department would be held to. Helen would walk each building and label each isle and cube, so the location would be easy to be found by the temps. She would distribute large easy to read labels for everybody scheduled to move. It was up to the employee to fill out their labels. The labels needed the name of the employee, what their current cube location was, and where they were supposed to move to. Managers would take time to have meetings with their people; about the move, and help the slower ones label their stuff. Sales drones (liars) tended to need more hand holding.
We did not have time to deal with people’s personal stuff. We urged people to take personal crap home – Our moves involved hundreds of people between 5 buildings and we didn’t have the time, space, patience, or inclination to take care of personal items. Helen would send detailed lists of what is personal and what is work related. It really needed to be spelled out for these people. Smart people would cart their personal belongings home in boxes provided, or place it in their new cube and label it to not be touched. They knew the easier they made our job, the faster they could get back to selling (lying).
Helen provided these giant bags, to be labeled by the employee, so we can place the mouse, keyboard, and cords into. We’d find them stuff full of office. Whatever we asked of employees, somebody would find a way to circumvent it.
Writing information on a label, and placing the labels on equipment to be moved, was way too much effort for some people. A few individuals placed all their books in large boxes. We ended up with 300# boxes. We got orders from our bosses to not move those giant boxes (it was a lifting danger). Helen created a new moving rule - “If YOU can’t lift it, IT doesn’t move it”.
Back to Colucci, this guy would do nothing correctly. He expected the IT department to do all his housekeeping for him. We would have to do his complete move including packing everything up. We’d still get calls the next morning because he’d want us to clean his dusty cube. It just never ended with this arrogant self-entitled jerk.
We were pushed over the edge by this guy and his antics. The next move was large, so again we had a bunch of temps contracted. Our crew and the temps were given orders prior to the move, and that included where to pile up all the unlabeled stuff. After a while with a large move, we couldn’t tell what was old and what was new. The temps were specifically assigned to bring the new stuff to Colucci’s cube, then upon seeing all of his unpacked, unlabeled stuff, they piled it with the other stuff from people who could not follow directions. The piles were labeled stuff from people who could not follow simple directions to drive home the point.
When we check everything over as we performed a walk-through we noticed, as expected, Colucci left all of his cube-stuff behind. The majority of his items were piled together, and some was left in his old cube (temps aren’t perfect). A select few of us carefully moved his books and papers around, so they would be lugged off with other people’s equipment when they found their unlabeled cube-stuff. As for his personal items: it was handed out to some of the people who had reasons to hate him, some of the stuff was misplaced, and other stuff was thrown away.
The rest of the weekend was spent hooking up all the computers back up, making sure everything worked, and running Windows Updates (this was prior to Automatic Updates). Monday morning the IT Department had Helen send an email to the people who could not follow directions; so they would know where to find their stuff. Colucci called and was told where his stuff would “probably” be. We would get to his computer when we could, but his personal stuff was all up to him. We were scheduled to be on other duties to finish post-move.
He declared emergency powers with Helen, and she called us to have all of his computer needs and personal stuff transported and set up just the way he wanted to shut him up. I think she was sick of babysitting him as well. IT had all of us paged, and all 15 of us participated in doing his emergency move. We made a spectacle of moving his stuff.
Colucci complained the whole day, as expected, and after the emergency move he wanted to know where all of his personal stuff was. Also some of his books and paperwork was missing. At that point all we could do was again tell him where the pile was. He spent the next couple of days searching for his crap, finding only a few bits and pieces. He resorted to sending a company-wide email asking if anyone had seen a few items of his that were lost during the move. Helen sent a company-wide reply reminding him of the directions explicitly telling everyone to take personal items home prior to the move, and how IT was not responsible for personal items during moves.
After his true colors were shown to everyone, it was open season on this guy.