Our development team at Harcourt in Orlando needed another member, so we placed some ads and got a bunch of resumes. Finally, we whittled the list down to a select few and started interviews. One candidate lived in NY, I think, so we arranged a video conference to interview him.
Gary seemed to know his stuff, and he answered all the questions. We put our heads together afterward, and nobody had a strong objection. So we made him an offer, and he accepted.
He ended up taking the train down with his car, since it was a long distance and he didn’t want to drive it. (When I moved down from NY, I drove it…)
So he showed up and got settled in. He was a little aloof, but he was the new guy so I cut him some slack. We were just starting a new big development project, and had to do some traveling to collect customer feedback and requirements, so Linda assigned us different destinations. (Lucky me, I got to fly to Minneapolis in January!) Since Gary was new, Linda decided he’d fly with her to wherever it was she was going.
Except he didn’t.
She waited at the airport gate as long as she could, and finally boarded the plane without him. She worried the whole flight that something had happened to him, and when she got to her hotel she found he’d sent her an email.
His resignation.
No real explanation or anything.
So we got to talking about it, and the conclusion I came to was that he was afraid of flying and didn’t want to admit it. That explained everything. We eventually found him somewhere on a web forum, but he wouldn’t admit to anything.
Sometimes, you just need to ask better interview questions.