His eyes were blue steel, hard. The crow’s feet that emerged from them belied his years. He couldn’t have been over 30, but he took everything in like a seasoned 20-year man.
His jaw was pointed and firm and in his first week, they’d already seen it wasn’t for show. They’d tried to go at him, testing his authority, and he’d shown them a stiff backbone and an unrelenting work ethic.
When the first of the heavy snows came, they arrived at work as best they could, to find the paths between buildings already cleared. He stood inside the doors of the main office in a t-shirt with sweat beading on his forehead to hand out the day’s assignments.
Within six months of his working there, he had turned them into the most productive unit in the company. What amazed his superiors was how little blowback there was from the employees. To a man, not a single negative word was spoken.
Instead they heard stories of problems that had arisen and how cool he had been in the face of them, putting people into place to fix what was wrong and make it better. Nothing fazed him.
Shock rippled through the unit when the executives came in and fired him. Rumors of it rippled through the buildings before the truth crashed down at the end of the day.
He left the same way he’d come in; quiet, cold steel in his eyes. He shook each of his men’s hands on the way out, staring them in the face and telling them to ‘keep up the good work.’
When the executives gathered the unit together at day’s end they were asked why they had let him go.
“You were too productive. You made the rest of the company look bad.”
