I’m sleeping soundly yesterday afternoon when, at around 1430, a phone call wakes me up. I know I shouldn’t sleep with my phone on, but it is a habit.
Anyway, I answer the phone and it is the manager at one of the facilities at my work and he is asking me if I could come into work early to cover an open shift. I don’t do the job he is asking me to cover for any longer, and I ask him why he called me in particular. He wheedles out an explanation full of compliments (which I simply must have if I’m going to be called off the bench to do a job I don’t like) and I follow up and ask him what happened to his new-hire that he has been training.
To my surprise, he says that he had to fire her.
He wouldn’t, and isn’t supposed to, tell me, but I went in three hours early anyway to clean up the job and then get along to my actual line of work. Upon my arrival, I start asking around as to what happened to cause the dude who doesn’t fire anyone, even if they deserve it, to have to cast this one aside.
And here is the scoop: One of our contracts demanded it.
My company contracts to every single animal testing lab in the tri-county area. Their locations are kept a secret, for obvious reasons, and in one of these contracts is a clause that basically states that anyone who will come in contact with their information must not only be given the standard criminal background check, but their information must also be given to the company so that they can do their own checking.
Let’s just say that the new girl didn’t pass the stink test for these folks.
From what I am able to gather, she was only able to pass the regular background check because we are not able to get our hands on recorded aliases. The unnamed company which hires us to get rid of their dead animals, because they have special domestic terrorism contacts, can.
Luckily for both us and said unnamed company, she barely got passed HR’s orientation and the prelim systems training before they called us. She hadn’t even gotten her login from IT yet so, no harm was done and the unnamed company is quite happy with the resolution.
Yes, I have passed their background check, and yes, I have been to all but one of the facilities. If the ALF/ELF knew where that one was, they’d just probably shit all over themselves because they walk past it every gotdam day on their way to the granola store.
I’m not sure if this was an attempt by the animal rights dweebs to get to information forbidden to them or if it was just a formerly misguided girl who got caught up by her past, and frankly, I could care less.
FYI: the dead animals are not just tossed into the landfill willy-nilly, they are cooked first in an autoclave, just like we have to do with all the trash that originates from outside the US. One of the jobs I hopefully never get trained for is what is known as “Working the Cooker”. It is a mobile autoclave you could park a Suburban in.
Needless to say, it is not the best smelling machine on the lot, and we deal with dozens of cubic yards of crab guts per day during the summer.
There are lots of folks in the PETA and eco-terror movements who are smart enough to put two and two together and come up with four. It DOESN’T take a dweeb to figure out that any commercial facility has to have their trash picked up, and if that trash includes regular amounts of biohazard, there is going to have to be special notations of it in “TrashCo’s” files.
TrashCo got lucky by catching her in time. Did they drop a dime on the FeeBees? If not, you might discuss doing that with the manager.
This problem isn’t new. All sorts of institutions you might not think about have been infiltrated. Chicago PD had a terrible time about a decade ago with the drug gangs getting people on the inside of the PD, into positions where they had total file access so that keeping files going on drug gang investigations became very difficult, indeed. It took them years to weed these people out.