You know that part in all good cop movies where they have one suspect in an interrogation room and the second suspect in another room? Law and Order does this EVERY show. Anyway, the trick is to have detectives talk to the weaker of the two suspects. They feed him bogus claims that the other suspect is going to shift the blame to him and make him feel stupid for defending the other guy. The detectives are trying to get the one suspect to roll on the other. In effect, they are trying to get the weaker one to break and then spill his guts as to what the real leader was doing.

If you talk, you are known as a stool pigeon or a snitch. All the Mob movies I have seen have taught me that being a stool pigeon or a snitch is a bad thing and usually results in you having to dig your own grave in a corn field before being beaten to death with baseball bats and tossed into your freshly dug hole. I’m just sayin’

I was once a stool pigeon…

Yep, that’s me in the corner. That’s me on the stool, singing like a pigeon….

My first job out of college was with Norfolk Southern Railroad. This would have been in 1998. The Chief Engineer that we worked for was a real ass. He was a 30-year railroad veteran and he had come up through the ranks and led by fear and intimidation.

As a junior engineer I was eager to make a good first impression. I took whatever job was handed to me. One day, my immediate boss called me into his office and handed me a small stack of papers and asked me if I had ever designed overflow pipes/risers for a pond. I told him that I had not, but that I was sure I could learn. As I was leaving his office, I asked him what job this was for and he said, “Mr. D’s (the Chief Engineer)”. I asked if it was for him for a project or for him personally? He said it was for him personally and that there was no big rush.

I tossed the papers in my To Do stack and planned on working on the design some rainy day. As luck would have it, I got extremely busy and began traveling all over to such exotic places as Buffalo, NY, Toledo, OH and Belleview, OH.

Life settled into a comfortable routine and my travels brought me into contact with all types of characters. I began to hear a common theme from people as they complained about their jobs…the Chief Engineer was a jackass. I heard stories about how he intimidated people and treated people like dirt.

Mind you, I never actually talked to the guy except for my first day when they showed me around. But I had heard the stories.

One of the things that railroads and other industries pride themselves on is their safety record. Norfolk Southern had been the safest railroad in the U.S. for the past few years. Most accidents happened on the line with people who worked with heavy equipment and were around trains all day, but one of our engineers was out surveying when he got overheated and became lightheaded. The guys with him sat him in one of the trucks and turned the air on. They thought he would be ok with a few minutes out of the heat, but he started having trouble seeing and he had a terrible headache. Not knowing what was wrong with him, they rushed him to the emergency room.

At the hospital, they hooked him up to IV’s and pumped him full of fluids. The Doctors said he was suffering from heat exhaustion and that it was good they brought him in or it could have been worse.

There was one problem; they had taken him to your run of the mill hospital. Because they hooked him up to IV’s, it became a reportable injury. That made the Chief Engineer look bad.

The Chief Engineer called up the hospital and tried to talk the guys wife into making him come into work so it would not be a loss time injury. I believe he called a few times at the hospital and a few times that night when they got the guy home. The engineer came in the next day for however long is required to make it NOT a lost time injury, then went home.

The Chief Engineer called a meeting after the guy left for the day. I was out of town and did not attend the meeting, but everyone told me about it later. Basically, the Chief Engineer stated that they should have taken the guy to a railroad approved doctor…I imagine kind of like an Army doctor…here, take these two aspirin…He went on to say that a railroad approved doctor knows the reporting regulations and would have taken more steps to ensure that the guy’s medical problem was not a reportable injury. He then said that we should let the guy know how much we did not appreciate him wrecking our perfect safety record.

Needless to say, his little pep talk did wonders for office morale.

It was probably a few months later when I received a phone call from Internal Audit. They are kind of like the Internal Affairs people who spy on the company’s workers and what not. They said that some information had come to light that they needed to speak to me about. I was instructed to meet them at their offices across town in 2 hours and that I was not to inform anyone, especially my boss.

I wanted to throw up. Had I been to a web site that was forbidden? Had I misstated my expense account? What had I done wrong?

I broke their little “don’t tell anyone” rule and went to a senior engineer who I respected. He asked me questions similar to the ones going through my head. After answering no to all the questions we were both stumped. He told me good luck and to just tell the truth.

When I got to Internal Audit, I was taken to a small room and was seated in a chair at the end of a table. I swear, if they had turned a spotlight on me, it would have been just like the movies. Two guys in suits come in and asked me my name and position and how long I had been with the railroad. I was nervous and still wanted to throw up.

Then they asked me, “Have you ever been asked to do work for the Chief Engineer on company time in return for money or other compensation?”

Oh man, was I relieved. It all made sense to me. Mr. D must have been asking people to do work for him. Like that overflow pipe for his pond….The pipes!! Oh yeah, my boss came by a few months after giving the work to me and asked if I had a chance to work on them. I told him I was sorry, but that I had been too busy. He said no problem and took the stack of papers back from me.

Back to the interrogation.

I was so relieved that I had not done anything wrong that I explained about the pipes and how I was told it was for Mr. D personally but that I had not had time to do the work and that my boss had taken it from me. Then they wanted names. It all happened so quickly. The guy was an ass and I was new and scared of losing my job. So I told them everything I had ever heard about the guy.

I sang like a bird. They asked lots of questions and I gave them what I knew. By the time they were finished I was both happy and shaking like a leaf.

Later on it hit me what I had done. But I was able to rationalize it away. After all, Mr. D was a jerk and we all hated him. Besides, if he was doing something wrong, then he deserved to be punished.

After a few weeks, it appeared that the names I had given had turned up a gold mine of information. Mr. D was asked to take another position. He was so close to retiring that the railroad elected to sideline him rather than fire him. It was reported that he told them he would “Not be stuck in some office without a phone.” With that, railroad police…yes they have their own law enforcement…showed up with a few empty boxes and told him he had 10 minutes to gather his things and then they escorted him off the property.

I felt like I had done a good thing. The new Chief Engineer was a much nicer guy and the spirit of intimidation that had existed left.

But….

Later on, like the next year, I was on a trip with a few guys from our office. They were in a different section and were not engineers, so I did not know them that well. Somehow they got on the subject of Mr. D and how he had been having contractors do work for free at his new house in exchange for preferential treatment with construction contracts. Then one of them said that he had heard that one of his own men had turned him in. They said that Internal Audit had put the screws to him and he sang like a canary.

I knew they were talking about me. I still do not know if they knew it was me and were trying to make me feel bad or if they had no idea that the canary had been me.

It raises a good question: Did I do the right thing?

Oh sure, what the guy was doing was wrong and he got what he deserved, but should I have been loyal to him and not squealed? Even though the guy was a total jerk, there was a certain amount of loyalty to him. He may be a jerk, but he is our jerk. The way the guys talked, they felt it was wrong for the person to spill their guts.

So what do you do? Looking back, I would not have done anything different, but I still feel a tinge of guilt that I totally ratted a guy out and was at least partially responsible for his “early retirement”.

What are your thoughts?