Posts Tagged: terminated

I have a fascination with the weird. I’m a firm believer in truth being stranger than fiction and there’s a lot of strange to be found if you go looking for it. I listen to people talk, watch the news on TV and scan the newspapers for the kinds of things that make me say wow. For me, anything weird or bizarre makes the basis for great fiction. My first book, Accidents Waiting to Happen, centered on the world of viatical settlements where people can trade life insurance policies on the living. We All Fall Down fictionally explored the odd happenings surrounding the real life death of three coworkers. All three men committed suicide in disturbing ways and never left any explanation. The peculiar goings on of the real world are also at play in my latest book, Terminated.

Terminated explores workplace violence. The book deals with a female boss who becomes the focus of a disgruntled employee’s angry fixation. Violence in the workplace in one form or another is probably something we’ve witnessed or encountered up close at some point at our day jobs. That’s not the weird bit. The weird bit is that according to government statistics, twenty people die at their place of work every week in the US. Now, this isn’t all coworker on coworker violence. A large majority is upset customer or robberies gone bad, but regardless, twenty people dying on the job is a scary number. And do you want to know which careers are most dangerous? If you’re thinking cop or corrections officer at a supermax prison, you’re wrong. It’s retail. By far, working retail is the most dangerous career out there when it comes to workplace murders. You’re safer working in a coal mine than at a department store when it comes to someone going postal.

I bet some of you are going to wake up in a cold sweat tonight. You’re welcome.

But government stats weren’t responsible for me writing Terminated. The weird bit that got my imagination going was what some companies are doing to combat workplace violence. Companies have begun adding up the cost of this type of violence. There’s the financial impact of lost time and firing and rehiring personnel, the legal costs incurred in prosecuting employees and defending the company against civil suits, bad PR and the disruption to employee morale. The financial list is endless. Companies obviously do their best to prevent these situations with employment policies and preventative measures. At my last job, the job offer was subject to a drug screen and extensive background check which included checking my criminal history, calling old bosses in the UK and interviewing friends, my wife and in-laws to see if I ever did anything horrible like beat my wife. I once had to submit to a handwriting analysis at another job. I didn’t get the position, so I’m not sure what that says about me and my chicken scratch. I’ve known people to be polygraphed for a job. Skeletons in someone’s closet aren’t necessarily used to exclude someone from their job but having them out in the open helps avoid certain situations—or so they say. Don’t ask me who “they” are.

Private security firms are being employed to investigate workplace violence claims. They determine the validity of the claim, provide personal protection for the employee in danger and their family and investigate the threatening employee. Investigating the threatening employee was where it got interesting for me. Depending on the circumstances, the security firm will investigate the employee without their knowledge—run a background check, interview witnesses, and even shadow the suspect’s moves. They will look for direct evidence pertaining to a physical threat, but also evidence not directly connected to the claim. If the investigators can unearth some skeletons that someone wouldn’t want earthed, they sometimes use them as leverage to make the disruptive employee leave the firm. Getting the troublesome employee to leave is often easier than entering into a legal battle over the matter. Companies aren’t interested in how the problem is resolved just as long as it’s resolved.

Needless to say, the concept of private security firms investigating workplace violence claims got my imagination running. It’s perfect story fodder for me. I saw the merits for such a measure and the limitations of going down this path. I wanted to explore what would happen even with these failsafes in place. What if the company failed to protect the employee in peril, forcing the employee to solve the problem themselves? In Terminated, the only person who can save Gwen Farris is Gwen Farris.

There’s eight million and one stories in the naked world and I’m always endeavor to find them and turn them into books. I can’t wait to unearth them.

This concludes the Book of the Month postings for Terminated, so if you’d like a little light reading, you can read the first five chapters here:
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five

Categories: book of the month

Grr, jurisdictions. I don’t like the US’s decentralized approach to governing its people. I’m from a country with a one-stop shopping approach to life. There’s one sales tax, one driving license, one government, one set of laws, one police force to name just a few. But here in the US, everything is fragmented. There are federal, state and local versions of everything. That means duplications, especially when it comes to politicians. No wonder we’re in a mess. But I’m digressing. Okay, I get the logic of a regional and provincial infrastructure and it worked well when to country was developing, but does it have to be so fragmented now? We no longer live in times where it takes a month to navigate the country. Communication happens in nanoseconds not days. This desire of mine applies most to the police in the US. I wish there was a centralized police force. It can be broken down by state, county, etc. but I want it to be one homogenous entity. I want a cop to be a cop to be a cop to be a cop. Not a fed, a marshal, a sheriff, or a cop.

I came to this conclusion a few years ago as I lay across a city-county limit line after being hit by a car. If this were the UK, a simple call to the emergency services would have sorted everything out, but sadly it turned into a three-ring circus of bureaucratic silliness. Who to call became an issue. My head and torso was in the city while my legs were in the county. A 911 call was an issue in itself. In my part of the US, it’s recommended that you don’t call 911 on your cell phone because it gets routed to a California Highway Patrol center in a different county and not the local dispatch. So the suggestion is that you keep your local police department’s phone number programmed into your phone. The people who witnessed the incident remembered this issue and covered all the bases by calling individual jurisdictions as well as 911. Calls were placed to the city, the county and CHP. Because I was at a city/county intersection, the matter of who should respond arose. I didn’t much care who responded as long as someone did. I was kind of concussed and bleeding inside at the time. Eventually, CHP won the battle because they only took twenty minutes to answer the phone, but also because the county has outsourced traffic accidents to the state. That must have been in a memo that didn’t reach me. In the meantime, I caught a ride to the hospital from a concerned citizen.

Despite the frustration of that situation, as a scribbler, everything that happens to me—good or bad—is grist for the mill and the mill is working. I don’t go out of my way to be subversive in my storytelling, but I do zero in on chinks in society’s armor. Proving the point that “one man’s meat is another man’s pudding,” a system of decentralization is open to abuse. Jurisdictional territoriality can be exploited by the devious. Normally, the investigating police entity is the one from where the crime or incident occurred. Obviously, things change when you cross state lines, but if I steal a car in Oakland and break into a house in Berkeley, it’s not going to be a federal case and the two city police departments aren’t going to band together unless something leads them to the fact. This is where my devious little writer mind comes in. If I wanted to victimize someone, I could commit each little crime in a different jurisdiction. It wouldn’t be hard. Very few of us live in the same city where we work. Using my wife as an example, her 30-mile commute takes her through ten city and county jurisdictions. Even if someone brought a complaint against me, they’d have to duplicate the complaint in every jurisdiction. Ah, the complexities of simplicity.

I played with this issue in Terminated. The story centers on a vindictive employee causing havoc for his boss. The incidents occur in different jurisdictions making it hard to point a finger at the guilty party.

Like I say, I don’t like decentralized government infrastructure, but it suits me fine when it comes to my fiction. 🙂

Categories: book of the month

April’s Book of the Month is Terminated. It’s a thriller that centers on workplace violence. Next week, I’ll share some of startling incidents that I found during my research.

Blurb:

Terminated…to some people, it’s more than a job.

Praise for Terminated:
“Wood writes like a dark, demented angel.”
— Ken Bruen, bestselling author of Once Were Cops

“A supremely gifted writer.”
— Jason Pinter, author of The Darkness

“Simon Wood knows how to create tension, he knows how to build three-dimensional characters and he has proven he can tie everything together in a high octane climax.”
— Book Browser

“Simon Wood packs his books with suspense, surprises and superb storytelling.”
— Ed Gorman, author of The Midnight Room

“This author is a master at taking a simple situation and making it suspenseful.”
— Midwest Book Review

“Simon Wood takes the idea of workplace harrassment to terrifying levels.”
— Bookgasm

“Grabs your heart and squeezes.”
— Fresh Fiction

“The tension is unbearable and it gets worse as the pages fly by.”
— I Love A Mystery

“Another winner for Simon Wood.”
— Spinetingler magazine

Categories: book of the month