- Report: #213458
Complaint Review: Executive Security Systems - The Charter Security Group - Austin Texas
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Executive Security Systems - The Charter Security Group
5555 North Lamar Blvd., #K-106 Austin, 78621 Texas, U.S.A.
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512-458-2258
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Executive Security Systems - The Charter Security Group Ripoff Don't go to work for the Austin office of ESSI They give job reference from h**l Austin Texas
*UPDATE EX-employee responds: You're Right On About the Job References from Hell
*UPDATE EX-employee responds: You're Right On About the Job References from Hell
*UPDATE EX-employee responds: You're Right On About the Job References from Hell
*Consumer Comment: OH MY GOD!
*Author of original report: Mainly Happy News and Puff Pieces Allowed
I should have gotten the hint when I went to apply for a job at Executive Security Systems, Inc ( ESSI) and it was pay day. I met an African American gentleman who was apparently picking up his last paycheck and, according to him, it was short.
"Man, I need to tell you, don't go to work here! They short your checks,"he warned me. "I been looking for a job and can't get one 'cause they give job references from hell."
I figured he was just a disgruntled former employee but I had not been in Austin, Texas that long. The economy here was white-hot and I thought I would get a security guard and some school hours while I was here.
Well, I should have listened to him, as it turns out.
In Dallas, if you are qualified to do the job and don't have a criminal record, it doesn't matter what color, gender, ethnicity you are, you will be put to work and your record will speak for itself.
This does not appear to be true in Austin. It is extremely difficult to get a job unless you have a pstron or person of influence to vouch for you. I am not sure why this is either. If you don't have a patron, it can take up to three weeks or so before employers will let you know if you are hired or not. I also found that people get blackballed a lot here and it happened to me and several people I know who worked here whom I interviewed for this article.
I guess the ESSI Austin office all starts with the Charter Security Group. I went to the Texas Department of Public Safety website, the part that deals with private security agencies and I looked it up. For some reason, Charter shows up in Addison, TX even though they apparently had an Austin, Texas office as well connections with an office at Bryan College Station, Texas ( Which may have been Minglewood Security, Inc).Both places have a surfeit of cheap student labor to maximize profits.
Charter went out of business in 1991. It was bought by ESSI in Dallas,TX. A complete list of employees was not available, however what was left showed that there were no women working for them and only one person with a Hispanic last name, one of the few people who is still working in the private security industry who worked for them. Two of their former employees were denied a commission to carry a firearm and another one's records were ordered locked by DPS Bureau. You can go on the DPS site and look up the Charter Security Group and some to your own conclusions.
I wasn't trained on my posts. The post instructions that they gave me were always out of date and I, too, was not warned about the alarm on the office door of the Bristol Square apartments that apparently went directly to the Austin police and dispatched an unhappy police officer who appeared to be on steroids and wanted to beat me up and take me in. Had I not called my supervisor when the alarm went off, I would have been jacked up on a burglary offense even though it was my job to check the doors and makes sure they were all locked -- and that one had been open. Deliberate? I am not sure to this day.
There is an EEOC category of supposedly illegal things that employers do to their employees and when they don't train them for the job that they are expected to do --including listing a job description, they are "setting the employee up for failure." If this is done to an employee in a protected age group, a minority group member or a female, then it is assumed there is prejudice for which an employee can get extra damages --assuming the employee has the money for an attorney to instigate the suit.
The best-known example of this occurred recently when they had a half-Native American gentleman in the protected age group and they put him on patrol. He was thrown a book that showed locations of the places he was supposed to inspect and no further instruction. The same tactic has been done on anyone that is not "one of the boyz" and it works very well... The man is no longer there --and he is getting job references from hell.
Austin, Texas claims to be a laid-back, cool place that doesn't like law and order or anyone telling them where
( especially "rent a pigs",the insulting term for security officers) and when to drink alcohol or what to do at all --but you can better believe there is apparently a WASP "good old boy" system like in the South where uppedity Blacks, women and Messcans and other minorities are put in their place. There is almost always one token person from each minority at work because prejudice in employment in Austin is frowned upon --at least overtly.
After I had faced down a rather perilous situation and guarded a construction site where a previous contractor had been fired and he sent a private investigation agency in to find out who had replaced him so he could sue all of them, I was asked to go to patrol.
A security service patrol is a rip-off to the security clients and to the security personnel who have to do it.
I see elsewhere on this site where people have made mention of it and it is everything they say it is. ESSI Austin is particuliarly ill-organized, apprently by people who have never actually themselves got in the patrol vehicles and tried to drive the "routes" as the patrol jurisdictions are called. These people have tried to cram as many patrol inspections (called "hits) as possible into as much territory as a vehicle can possibly cover! IF you don't have the proper training, you might miss a patrol hit and the client is not getting what they paid the security company for. This is called fraud. At the price of $4 - $6 a patrol "hit" --the client really does get what they pay for most of the time. When you consider when I was there, the patrol officer also had to respond to alarms, make escorts of persons who repaired ATMs, make sure employees got out of various businesses safely at closing time, responded to disturbance calls in apartment complexes, made deliveries and had to lock and unlock various buildings at certain times. If you actually apprehended anyone committing a crime and had to detain for the police or deputies, instead of getting a commendation, you would probably be fired with the subsequent blacklisting that went with it because you would have missed your patrol hits. The stress was unbelievable!
All of which we were only getting paid $5 when I worked there. The guys nowdays are getting paid according to the individual patrol account, I am told and they are forbidden to elaborate. I want ot know what I am making before I even set foot on a post, much less a patrol account!
It's not a problem to get fired for being unable to do an impossible job in an incredibly hostile work environment, it is the snide, vindictive job references --entirely false --that come later. And idiot employers in Austin believe this person. The fascade of respectability and the belief that security officers should be honest like the police are supposed to be and the people who operate the companies are supposed to be paragons of virture. Not in Austin, Texas. And not at ESSI.
The patrol officers coped with the untentable situation in two ways. Ran the hell out of the patrol vehicles and hoped that the police did not ticket you ( because they despised us and lay in wait for us, especially at Rollingwood and Noerthwest Hills). This meant no lunch breaks or any sort of breaks that the US Department of Transportation has mandated for commercial drivers and the restroom was whatever dark place you found yourself in and forget any lunch break, You were forbidden to eat in the vehicles. Eating in the vehicles was not considered "professional" by the hopelessly out of touch people in the office who had never had the actual experience of running a patrol route.One of them actually tried to run a patrol route recently, I heard, but walked off before he even ran half the route. Not being able to train anyone else on that route, he fired a veteran patrol officer because he could not learn it on his own. Set up for failure and violation of Wage and Hour restroom and lunch break policy.
"Everybody knows that the dice are loaded, everybody rolls with their fingers crossed...Everybody knows that the war is over.Everybody knows that the good guys lost"... from bumper music heard on Reublic Broadcasting Network...
The other way they coped was not to run the patrol route at all. One of the patrol officers at ESSI who did prison time and can no longer be employed as a security officer in Texas in a damily violence incident, would sit at Jim's Resaturant at the intersection of Ben White Blvd. and I-35 South for his entire shift and write imaginary patrol hits and fictious reports. He bragged about it to anyone who cared to listen. This practice is called "ghosting" and nobody but nobody should have done it for an entire shift. The acting general manager knew about it, the patrol manager knew about it, just like they knoew that he would show up for work drunk but they would make his hits for him.
I talked face to face with two women this guy harrassed and one of them had a daughter with him! They worked at ESSI Austin and one reported that she had complained about him but nothing had been done. The regional manager/vice-president apparently dropped the ball on this because she went and complained to the CIty of Austin Human Rights Commission and the EEOC but nothing was done there either. Apparently the Corporate Headquarters did something after the complaints were filed but she was gone and the other woman was apparently too scared to complain. She was working for an elite security company in Austin, but I have no idea what happened to her. Perhaps she went back to South Texas where she came from. Nothing was done because neither one could afford legal representation and the statute of limitations has expired.
The same guy liked to slash tires and smash window glass in vehicles of the people he did not like. At least three patrol officers went to work for another company because of him.
In my case, I know why he was not terminated and it was "for special services provided..." Patrol was supposed to be an elite assignment. We were provided with white Nissan pickup trucks with standard shifts. This served the purpose of excluding women, certain minorities who had no experience with stick shifts from the patrol division back then. Because I did, they couldn't keep me out of the patrol sector. The turnover was so high that they would take whoever was stupid enough to agree to go in the trucks! Then when enough young white boys came on board, excuses would be thought up to get rid of people like me.
We were personally responsible for any tickets we incurred. There is supposed to be a vicarious liability on company-owned vehicles whereby the corpoartion is responsiblke for any actions their employees take, including traffic tickets and especially equipment violations such as burned out tail lights and headlights. It is rather unfair for a coproation to expect the $5 an hour personnel to pay for oil,brake fluid, head light and tail light installation on their own --but we had to pay the tickets for the traffic light violations that the police wrote to us.
I remember the fear I felt when the Westlake Hills police officer pulled me over and I searched for the proof of insurance card and it was not there! Fortunately, she did not ask to see it or I would have been the one who got the ticket for driving with no insurance! And I would have been the one who would have had to pay it or go to jail!
When I got back to the office, I asked the other patrol officers if they had proof of insurance card in case mine had been taken out of my truck because I was being set up to go to jail and possibly lose my commission. Nobody had one. I went to the patrol manager who told me that he didn't know why there were no proof of insurance cards in the trucks and it was none of my business. I never saw one as long as I worked there and I started putting out my resume to get out of there.
The interim office manager was allegedly compiling incriminating evidence that he said he was going to take somewhere. I imagine whatever he had did not go far because the last time I checked his entry on the DPS Security Agency site, he hasn't worked in the private security field since then, nor will he.
If officers wrecked the truck, the general policy was that they had to pay for the replacement. I don't know if they were charged the Blue Book rate for fully depreciated vehicles or if they were charged for new rates. The thing was that they didn't even get to keep the truck they wrecked after they had paid for it --at least they could have parted it out and got something for it. There was somehing in the employment contract that they signed, I am told. I had no intention of wrecking it because I coudln't afford to and I never did. But there was one incident...
Jose
Houston, Texas
U.S.A.
"Man, I need to tell you, don't go to work here! They short your checks,"he warned me. "I been looking for a job and can't get one 'cause they give job references from hell."
I figured he was just a disgruntled former employee but I had not been in Austin, Texas that long. The economy here was white-hot and I thought I would get a security guard and some school hours while I was here.
Well, I should have listened to him, as it turns out.
In Dallas, if you are qualified to do the job and don't have a criminal record, it doesn't matter what color, gender, ethnicity you are, you will be put to work and your record will speak for itself.
This does not appear to be true in Austin. It is extremely difficult to get a job unless you have a pstron or person of influence to vouch for you. I am not sure why this is either. If you don't have a patron, it can take up to three weeks or so before employers will let you know if you are hired or not. I also found that people get blackballed a lot here and it happened to me and several people I know who worked here whom I interviewed for this article.
I guess the ESSI Austin office all starts with the Charter Security Group. I went to the Texas Department of Public Safety website, the part that deals with private security agencies and I looked it up. For some reason, Charter shows up in Addison, TX even though they apparently had an Austin, Texas office as well connections with an office at Bryan College Station, Texas ( Which may have been Minglewood Security, Inc).Both places have a surfeit of cheap student labor to maximize profits.
Charter went out of business in 1991. It was bought by ESSI in Dallas,TX. A complete list of employees was not available, however what was left showed that there were no women working for them and only one person with a Hispanic last name, one of the few people who is still working in the private security industry who worked for them. Two of their former employees were denied a commission to carry a firearm and another one's records were ordered locked by DPS Bureau. You can go on the DPS site and look up the Charter Security Group and some to your own conclusions.
I wasn't trained on my posts. The post instructions that they gave me were always out of date and I, too, was not warned about the alarm on the office door of the Bristol Square apartments that apparently went directly to the Austin police and dispatched an unhappy police officer who appeared to be on steroids and wanted to beat me up and take me in. Had I not called my supervisor when the alarm went off, I would have been jacked up on a burglary offense even though it was my job to check the doors and makes sure they were all locked -- and that one had been open. Deliberate? I am not sure to this day.
There is an EEOC category of supposedly illegal things that employers do to their employees and when they don't train them for the job that they are expected to do --including listing a job description, they are "setting the employee up for failure." If this is done to an employee in a protected age group, a minority group member or a female, then it is assumed there is prejudice for which an employee can get extra damages --assuming the employee has the money for an attorney to instigate the suit.
The best-known example of this occurred recently when they had a half-Native American gentleman in the protected age group and they put him on patrol. He was thrown a book that showed locations of the places he was supposed to inspect and no further instruction. The same tactic has been done on anyone that is not "one of the boyz" and it works very well... The man is no longer there --and he is getting job references from hell.
Austin, Texas claims to be a laid-back, cool place that doesn't like law and order or anyone telling them where
( especially "rent a pigs",the insulting term for security officers) and when to drink alcohol or what to do at all --but you can better believe there is apparently a WASP "good old boy" system like in the South where uppedity Blacks, women and Messcans and other minorities are put in their place. There is almost always one token person from each minority at work because prejudice in employment in Austin is frowned upon --at least overtly.
After I had faced down a rather perilous situation and guarded a construction site where a previous contractor had been fired and he sent a private investigation agency in to find out who had replaced him so he could sue all of them, I was asked to go to patrol.
A security service patrol is a rip-off to the security clients and to the security personnel who have to do it.
I see elsewhere on this site where people have made mention of it and it is everything they say it is. ESSI Austin is particuliarly ill-organized, apprently by people who have never actually themselves got in the patrol vehicles and tried to drive the "routes" as the patrol jurisdictions are called. These people have tried to cram as many patrol inspections (called "hits) as possible into as much territory as a vehicle can possibly cover! IF you don't have the proper training, you might miss a patrol hit and the client is not getting what they paid the security company for. This is called fraud. At the price of $4 - $6 a patrol "hit" --the client really does get what they pay for most of the time. When you consider when I was there, the patrol officer also had to respond to alarms, make escorts of persons who repaired ATMs, make sure employees got out of various businesses safely at closing time, responded to disturbance calls in apartment complexes, made deliveries and had to lock and unlock various buildings at certain times. If you actually apprehended anyone committing a crime and had to detain for the police or deputies, instead of getting a commendation, you would probably be fired with the subsequent blacklisting that went with it because you would have missed your patrol hits. The stress was unbelievable!
All of which we were only getting paid $5 when I worked there. The guys nowdays are getting paid according to the individual patrol account, I am told and they are forbidden to elaborate. I want ot know what I am making before I even set foot on a post, much less a patrol account!
It's not a problem to get fired for being unable to do an impossible job in an incredibly hostile work environment, it is the snide, vindictive job references --entirely false --that come later. And idiot employers in Austin believe this person. The fascade of respectability and the belief that security officers should be honest like the police are supposed to be and the people who operate the companies are supposed to be paragons of virture. Not in Austin, Texas. And not at ESSI.
The patrol officers coped with the untentable situation in two ways. Ran the hell out of the patrol vehicles and hoped that the police did not ticket you ( because they despised us and lay in wait for us, especially at Rollingwood and Noerthwest Hills). This meant no lunch breaks or any sort of breaks that the US Department of Transportation has mandated for commercial drivers and the restroom was whatever dark place you found yourself in and forget any lunch break, You were forbidden to eat in the vehicles. Eating in the vehicles was not considered "professional" by the hopelessly out of touch people in the office who had never had the actual experience of running a patrol route.One of them actually tried to run a patrol route recently, I heard, but walked off before he even ran half the route. Not being able to train anyone else on that route, he fired a veteran patrol officer because he could not learn it on his own. Set up for failure and violation of Wage and Hour restroom and lunch break policy.
"Everybody knows that the dice are loaded, everybody rolls with their fingers crossed...Everybody knows that the war is over.Everybody knows that the good guys lost"... from bumper music heard on Reublic Broadcasting Network...
The other way they coped was not to run the patrol route at all. One of the patrol officers at ESSI who did prison time and can no longer be employed as a security officer in Texas in a damily violence incident, would sit at Jim's Resaturant at the intersection of Ben White Blvd. and I-35 South for his entire shift and write imaginary patrol hits and fictious reports. He bragged about it to anyone who cared to listen. This practice is called "ghosting" and nobody but nobody should have done it for an entire shift. The acting general manager knew about it, the patrol manager knew about it, just like they knoew that he would show up for work drunk but they would make his hits for him.
I talked face to face with two women this guy harrassed and one of them had a daughter with him! They worked at ESSI Austin and one reported that she had complained about him but nothing had been done. The regional manager/vice-president apparently dropped the ball on this because she went and complained to the CIty of Austin Human Rights Commission and the EEOC but nothing was done there either. Apparently the Corporate Headquarters did something after the complaints were filed but she was gone and the other woman was apparently too scared to complain. She was working for an elite security company in Austin, but I have no idea what happened to her. Perhaps she went back to South Texas where she came from. Nothing was done because neither one could afford legal representation and the statute of limitations has expired.
The same guy liked to slash tires and smash window glass in vehicles of the people he did not like. At least three patrol officers went to work for another company because of him.
In my case, I know why he was not terminated and it was "for special services provided..." Patrol was supposed to be an elite assignment. We were provided with white Nissan pickup trucks with standard shifts. This served the purpose of excluding women, certain minorities who had no experience with stick shifts from the patrol division back then. Because I did, they couldn't keep me out of the patrol sector. The turnover was so high that they would take whoever was stupid enough to agree to go in the trucks! Then when enough young white boys came on board, excuses would be thought up to get rid of people like me.
We were personally responsible for any tickets we incurred. There is supposed to be a vicarious liability on company-owned vehicles whereby the corpoartion is responsiblke for any actions their employees take, including traffic tickets and especially equipment violations such as burned out tail lights and headlights. It is rather unfair for a coproation to expect the $5 an hour personnel to pay for oil,brake fluid, head light and tail light installation on their own --but we had to pay the tickets for the traffic light violations that the police wrote to us.
I remember the fear I felt when the Westlake Hills police officer pulled me over and I searched for the proof of insurance card and it was not there! Fortunately, she did not ask to see it or I would have been the one who got the ticket for driving with no insurance! And I would have been the one who would have had to pay it or go to jail!
When I got back to the office, I asked the other patrol officers if they had proof of insurance card in case mine had been taken out of my truck because I was being set up to go to jail and possibly lose my commission. Nobody had one. I went to the patrol manager who told me that he didn't know why there were no proof of insurance cards in the trucks and it was none of my business. I never saw one as long as I worked there and I started putting out my resume to get out of there.
The interim office manager was allegedly compiling incriminating evidence that he said he was going to take somewhere. I imagine whatever he had did not go far because the last time I checked his entry on the DPS Security Agency site, he hasn't worked in the private security field since then, nor will he.
If officers wrecked the truck, the general policy was that they had to pay for the replacement. I don't know if they were charged the Blue Book rate for fully depreciated vehicles or if they were charged for new rates. The thing was that they didn't even get to keep the truck they wrecked after they had paid for it --at least they could have parted it out and got something for it. There was somehing in the employment contract that they signed, I am told. I had no intention of wrecking it because I coudln't afford to and I never did. But there was one incident...
Jose
Houston, Texas
U.S.A.
5 Updates & Rebuttals
Joe
Austin,Texas,
U.S.A.
Mainly Happy News and Puff Pieces Allowed
#2Author of original report
Wed, October 04, 2006
Numerous people of my acquaintance have tried to get things printed in the newspapers there but Austin wants to keep its image being a wonderful, progressive HAPPY place to come SPEND MONEY AND PARTY --where diversity is honored ( unless it pertains to socioeconomic class because this place is the most expensive place to live in Texas!), the newspapers here concentrate on what people in the media call "puff pieces." They want to encourage RICH people most of all to live here! Rich people want to create as much reality as their money will shield them from! The newspaper aids and abets because it is good business to get rid of the poor and voices of dissent -- best done with gentrification and jacking up prices on everything, especially rent. How many multi-million dollar TRENDY, UPSCALE condos can they build ( including wanting to tear down a new post office so they can replace it with a condo) without running out of owners? Read the real estate ads in the Sunday edition of the local daily paper and find out. Even Capital Metro ( their mass transit bus service) has eliminated the Ozone Days when people could ride without charge because they wanted to attract more yuppie riders... or so the story goes...Having to see the misery, suffering and pain of genuinely poor people who can't find a job and want to work confronting them on the buses apparently was too much for the yuppies. Bad for the mass transit image. Image is everything in Austin! Security guards are considered the working POOR, somewhat slightly above janitors on the yuppies' "vermin factor" list with yuppies. Most of the local feature stories and most news here is cheerleading so that industry will come and still more rich people will come and wonderful old ethnic neighborhoods will be gentrified out of existence to make room for MORE overpriced luxury condos! -- this is primarily what goes into the newspapers there. All of them that have any meaningful circulation, that is. Since the concierge or the cleaning people or the security guard won't be able to afford to live in the multi-million dollar condos they will serve, maybe the yuppie real estate developer lords will permit them to exist and premit them to sleep under the front stairs and wash up in restrooms at poolside. They might even have the privilege of getting newspapers to cover up when it gets cold at night and table scraps begged from the upscale and trendy residents. The only sure media coverage people around here care about is FOOTBALL. Yuppie version of reality there goes lilke this: They don't get want to get old and outgrow the party lifestyle. The yuppies with spawn want the sidewalks to roll up at 9- 10 p.m.because everybody ought to live like they live! Above all, they DON'T want anyone telling them what to do -- everything from embezzling money so they can maintain the traditional, laid back Old Austin " I have a trust fund" life style to drinking and driving to shoplifting and doing whatever the hell THEY want to do. ( The daily paper does report people who have been caught embezzling! and stories about driving drunk and killing people. That happens a lot here.) A well-known media guy named Alex Jones on genesis microbroadcasting network and Radio Free Austin has been trying to wake them up. Alex Jones doesn't have time for us. He's doing important stuff like fighting The New World Order and the One World Goverment! Sometimes a TV station will do a story on another TEMP agency that has vanished with all of the workers' paychecks. (That's something else that Austin is becoming famous for --rude and crooked employers, mostly yuppies, who cheat their employees while they treat them like serfs from the Middle Ages. This is theft of services and just plain fraud.) But those stories begin to get old after a while ... There was an article in one of the local Spanish language newspapers recently talking about all of the frauds that happen in Austin, Texas but you wont' find it in the daily newspaper here. Traditionally, The Dallas Morning News has had better coverage of Austin than the Austin paper has. Besides, the things I reported at ESSI mostly happened in the 1990s. It is the things that happened in the 2000s that are also interesting. Suspend belief when you come to Austin where nothing bad ever happens and happy little yuppies can shut downtown streets to have their footrace and bicycle marathon races, let their spawn run wild and undisclipined and are probably one paycheck and several overloaded credit cards away from homelessness themselves. But you mostly have HAPPY NEWS from Austin newspapers when it comes to local coverage. They focus a lot on the International and State news. They run their obligatory share of sob stories and "gimme money for the poor"--usually minority people in need and serving to reenforce stereotypes at Christmas time but investigative reporting might make unpleasant things turn up. Local news tends to be like the soma in Orwell's "1984."
Chris
Santa Maria,California,
U.S.A.
OH MY GOD!
#3Consumer Comment
Tue, October 03, 2006
This place sounds horrible! You guys have named so many infractions I don't even want to go into them...all I have to say is, RUN, don't walk, to the nearest media outlets & EXPOSE them for the unprofessional frauds they are! Money talks, & how do you think their customers will feel when they find out about the "ghosting"? They'll never know whether their account was one of those that got shortchanged! Ultimate result: THEY'LL GO ELSEWHERE! See? Not to mention all of the labor & pay violations. This obviously is a company who depends on the fact that their young, high-turnover employees don't know anything about proper & legal employment practices. If the practices are as you say, they would be investigated in a minute. Contact all of your local stations & newspapers (surely there's ONE in Austin that's not part of the "good ole boys network") & GIVE THEM THIS STORY! Believe me, they'll eat it up - especially since it's TRUE. One afterthought: Everywhere I've ever worked, the cardinal rule has been to never give an employment reference more than dates of employment & duties, and I think whether or not the person is "eligible for rehire." The reason given was always because they didn't want to be sued. SO...perhaps the people who were victims of these false, inflammatory references should sue. Legally, under "discovery," the companies who received these bad reference would have to disclose the details...besides, they have no ax to grind either way. It sounds like whatever they said was highly illegal & a "sue-able" offense!
Helene
Elgin,Texas,
U.S.A.
You're Right On About the Job References from Hell
#4UPDATE EX-employee responds
Mon, October 02, 2006
I have to agree with everything you said, Jose. I worked for this company and I personally knew ( or can guess) who each person you named was. THEY GAVE ME JOB REFERENCES FROM HELL to keep me from EVER working in Austin, Texas or anyplace else again. It was just like I had been attacked personally by a vile, vindictive Queen!-- ( Maybe I was) I DO think they rather overstepped their bounds because I had NO desire to ever be in private security again after I worked for four companies there. They wanted to obliterate me off the face of the earth and that is NOT what a job reference is supposed to do. I found out they were throwing me references from hell when I applied for a trucking company and this is what they said to me. " This company (ESSI) listed on your application threw some horrible references and I am really glad all we have to do is verify dates of employment because they wanted to tell us a lot more and it doesn't even apply to truck driving. What the hell did you do to p*** them off like that?" I was hired but before I shipped out, I sent out some more resumes listing the same places of employment. I then called back several and some hung up on me. Austin employers have world-class rudeness. One law enforcement agency I applied with said I would need to come down there with my lawyer and refused to let me see or read the comments that had been made during the background check. Considering that I had never been in jail or even arrested, I will always wonder what it said because I could not afford an attorney. I travelled several miles spending money I did not have on gasoline I never should have had to use just to hear the chief of police tell me that he just wanted to see what I looked like and he didn't think anybody could be as bad as they made me out to be but he never said who "they" were and he didn't offer me a job either. Moral of the story: DO NOT GO TO WORK FOR SOMEONE UNLESS YOU LOOK THEM UP ON THE RIPOFF REPORT! Come to think about it, they werent listed on the rip off report when I went to work there. THEY ARE NOW! You got a lot more to report about them Jose! Thank you for interviewing me but you also left out the part where they made the patrol officers pay for the EQUIPMENT VIOLATIONS citations that the police officers issued them even though it was not their responsibilities to keep the vehicles in good repair. That responsibility belongs to the corporation. It's not your fault a tail light or a headlight burns out but the cops hated us so much, they would nitpick and FIND things to write tickets about, including put the penny in the tire tread. Things like that... We had an unwinnable war on three fronts. An ungrateful security company that discriminated then and discriminates now, Angry, frustrated clients who apparently were sold a bill of good that their property was the ONLY property we patrolled at night and thge cops from three city jurisdictions who HATED us and laid in wait for us.. Jose, I think you are UNDERSTATING it!
Helene
Elgin,Texas,
U.S.A.
You're Right On About the Job References from Hell
#5UPDATE EX-employee responds
Mon, October 02, 2006
I have to agree with everything you said, Jose. I worked for this company and I personally knew ( or can guess) who each person you named was. THEY GAVE ME JOB REFERENCES FROM HELL to keep me from EVER working in Austin, Texas or anyplace else again. It was just like I had been attacked personally by a vile, vindictive Queen!-- ( Maybe I was) I DO think they rather overstepped their bounds because I had NO desire to ever be in private security again after I worked for four companies there. They wanted to obliterate me off the face of the earth and that is NOT what a job reference is supposed to do. I found out they were throwing me references from hell when I applied for a trucking company and this is what they said to me. " This company (ESSI) listed on your application threw some horrible references and I am really glad all we have to do is verify dates of employment because they wanted to tell us a lot more and it doesn't even apply to truck driving. What the hell did you do to p*** them off like that?" I was hired but before I shipped out, I sent out some more resumes listing the same places of employment. I then called back several and some hung up on me. Austin employers have world-class rudeness. One law enforcement agency I applied with said I would need to come down there with my lawyer and refused to let me see or read the comments that had been made during the background check. Considering that I had never been in jail or even arrested, I will always wonder what it said because I could not afford an attorney. I travelled several miles spending money I did not have on gasoline I never should have had to use just to hear the chief of police tell me that he just wanted to see what I looked like and he didn't think anybody could be as bad as they made me out to be but he never said who "they" were and he didn't offer me a job either. Moral of the story: DO NOT GO TO WORK FOR SOMEONE UNLESS YOU LOOK THEM UP ON THE RIPOFF REPORT! Come to think about it, they werent listed on the rip off report when I went to work there. THEY ARE NOW! You got a lot more to report about them Jose! Thank you for interviewing me but you also left out the part where they made the patrol officers pay for the EQUIPMENT VIOLATIONS citations that the police officers issued them even though it was not their responsibilities to keep the vehicles in good repair. That responsibility belongs to the corporation. It's not your fault a tail light or a headlight burns out but the cops hated us so much, they would nitpick and FIND things to write tickets about, including put the penny in the tire tread. Things like that... We had an unwinnable war on three fronts. An ungrateful security company that discriminated then and discriminates now, Angry, frustrated clients who apparently were sold a bill of good that their property was the ONLY property we patrolled at night and thge cops from three city jurisdictions who HATED us and laid in wait for us.. Jose, I think you are UNDERSTATING it!
Helene
Elgin,Texas,
U.S.A.
You're Right On About the Job References from Hell
#6UPDATE EX-employee responds
Mon, October 02, 2006
I have to agree with everything you said, Jose. I worked for this company and I personally knew ( or can guess) who each person you named was. THEY GAVE ME JOB REFERENCES FROM HELL to keep me from EVER working in Austin, Texas or anyplace else again. It was just like I had been attacked personally by a vile, vindictive Queen!-- ( Maybe I was) I DO think they rather overstepped their bounds because I had NO desire to ever be in private security again after I worked for four companies there. They wanted to obliterate me off the face of the earth and that is NOT what a job reference is supposed to do. I found out they were throwing me references from hell when I applied for a trucking company and this is what they said to me. " This company (ESSI) listed on your application threw some horrible references and I am really glad all we have to do is verify dates of employment because they wanted to tell us a lot more and it doesn't even apply to truck driving. What the hell did you do to p*** them off like that?" I was hired but before I shipped out, I sent out some more resumes listing the same places of employment. I then called back several and some hung up on me. Austin employers have world-class rudeness. One law enforcement agency I applied with said I would need to come down there with my lawyer and refused to let me see or read the comments that had been made during the background check. Considering that I had never been in jail or even arrested, I will always wonder what it said because I could not afford an attorney. I travelled several miles spending money I did not have on gasoline I never should have had to use just to hear the chief of police tell me that he just wanted to see what I looked like and he didn't think anybody could be as bad as they made me out to be but he never said who "they" were and he didn't offer me a job either. Moral of the story: DO NOT GO TO WORK FOR SOMEONE UNLESS YOU LOOK THEM UP ON THE RIPOFF REPORT! Come to think about it, they werent listed on the rip off report when I went to work there. THEY ARE NOW! You got a lot more to report about them Jose! Thank you for interviewing me but you also left out the part where they made the patrol officers pay for the EQUIPMENT VIOLATIONS citations that the police officers issued them even though it was not their responsibilities to keep the vehicles in good repair. That responsibility belongs to the corporation. It's not your fault a tail light or a headlight burns out but the cops hated us so much, they would nitpick and FIND things to write tickets about, including put the penny in the tire tread. Things like that... We had an unwinnable war on three fronts. An ungrateful security company that discriminated then and discriminates now, Angry, frustrated clients who apparently were sold a bill of good that their property was the ONLY property we patrolled at night and thge cops from three city jurisdictions who HATED us and laid in wait for us.. Jose, I think you are UNDERSTATING it!
