No Good Deed Goes Unpunished

This makes me angry. A Jacksonville, Florida man, Colin Bruley, took heroic measures to save a woman’s life. His reward? Getting fired from his job.

Bruley worked as a leasing agent for an apartment complex. Late one evening, he awoke to the sound of gunfire nearby and screaming. He grabbed his 12-gauge shotgun and ran out the door to see what was the matter.

He found one of the residents lying down with a bloody leg, to which he immediately tended to.

The victim and her sister praised him for his help. But what did management do? They said he was in violation of company policy: brandishing a weapon on company property and failing to report the incident afterwards.

Excuse me?

It astonishes me every time I hear of such ignorance. This is a perfect example of people refusing to think for themselves and doing the right thing. Instead, they smell “lawsuits” in the air and make themselves feel productive by doing something. And if that something has been written down somewhere, then certainly they’re doing the right thing. Right? Wrong.

Hey, here’s an idea for management: instead of applying a policy that clearly wasn’t meant to cover such an incident (fitting a square peg into a round hole), why not put some common sense effort into your actions?

Have we really sunk this low? Has common sense actually been substituted by playing it safe?

Hey, I’m all for planning ahead — I am, after all, a project manager by trade. But I know from experience that you plan for the unknown. You have a contingency plan for when things go astray. And if your contingencies don’t apply, then darnit you think of something that will!

When policy after policy is created, we run the risk of saying, “Hey we don’t have to think anymore because we’ve already done it.” Not so. Policies are important, but not to the extent that we remove ourselves from responsibility and stop being thinkers.

[tags]responsibility,common sense,heroes[/tags]

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