Asecurity manager visiting a company manufacturing floor noticed a curtain hung around a work area. He asked if proprietary work was being done behind the curtain. “No,” he was told, “that’s just how we deal with Bill.” Bill had long, loud, demonstrative conversations with God while he worked on the floor, so they’d put up the curtain to shield the other employees from his disturbing behavior. This is how they had dealt with Bill for years. They had a delusional and potentially dangerous employee on their hands, but site management and HR dealt with him as a local issue and never told security or anyone else about it.
This is a true story. Situations like this are seen in companies all over the country all too frequently, and they sometimes end in workplace violence and other security-related incidents. It’s interesting how often investigations into these events after the fact uncover indicators of potentially violent behavior in the files of multiple corporate departments, clues that could have triggered actions to reduce risk of an incident if they’d only been shared.