Coworker Had Four Duffel Bags of Urine in his Office
Matty Kerr is co-creator with John Brancaccio of The Working Experience. He is also a filmmaker and published author. Listen to our podcast on iTunes and Spotify and visit our website: theworkingexperience.com for videos, merchandise and more. You can also find us on Facebook, Linked In, Instagram, and Twitter.
One reason I like doing the Working Experience Podcast is that the stories I hear dispel many incorrect notions I have about society. The corporate world is not the conservative, buttoned down world I had always envisioned.
Byron, wearing a Brioni, Burberry tie and classic white button suit asks, “How was your weekend, Robert? Smashing I hope?”
Robert, wearing exactly the same outfit, replies, “Undeniably, Stuart. Buffy and I took Chip and Beverly to the Harvard Yale game. Oh, we trounced those Yalies, I assure you!”
Stuffy chuckle.
“And you?”
“Ah, we took the yacht over to North Hampton for dinner. Just balmy, balmy my good man!”
More chuckling.
I am probably replaying an episode of some TV show in my head with that description. After speaking with people who work in that world, I have come to learn that that picture is not entirely accurate. There is a fair amount of alcohol and drug abuse and general depravity, probably even more so than in other occupations.
My friend Gary was working as a manager at a Series Seven accounting firm, one of the prominent ones in Manhattan. One of his coworkers, a person of equivalent rank in the company, Jeffery, who managed a different department, had been exhibiting some erratic behavior: asking people to lend him money, disappearing in the middle of the day and then for extended periods of time etc. Everyone was pretty sure that there were drugs involved, excessive partying and such, but he wasn’t Gary’s responsibility.
At one point, the guy had been MIA for several weeks. Some folks from upper management finally showed up and started asking questions, like “Where is so and so?” These are large companies but it still amazes me that it takes so long for them to get wind that one of their employees had not been at work for quite some time. From what Gary said, someone should have stepped in long before they finally did.
For his part, Gary told them that he hadn’t seen the guy, thought maybe he had been working from home etc. He really didn’t want to get involved and besides, the guy was a grown man, presumably a college graduate; it wasn’t part of Gary’s job description to look after him and put him to bed at night and make sure he ate his Gerber Mashed Peas.
The circumstances around the man’s activities remain murky. It is thought that he was using meth and perhaps other substances and may have been arrested at some point. He had been living at his parents’ home at the time and they had not seen him in some time. It was also suspected that he had been going out to clubs and bringing people, men and women, back to the office for orgies or trysts of some kind.
In addition, there was pretty substantive evidence that he had been living in his office to some degree. When it was finally cleaned out, four rather large duffle bags were removed. These bags contained, not drugs, not cash, but dozens of plastic bottles of urine. The thought is that he did not want to be caught on the security camera going out to the bathroom so he was peeing in the bottles. Why he didn’t just empty the bottles or take them out of the office is a mystery. His guests must have been peeing in the bottles as well. God knows what they did if someone had to defecate.
Class, education, intelligence, money…these things really don’t matter if someone is on drugs or crazy or just plain fucked up. No amount of money or breeding or intelligence will provide cover for the darkest corners of the human psyche forever.
