At Jack in the Box, the “maintenance person” is a person who ensures that the building and the premises are clean and who does simple tasks, like filtering and changing the shortening used in the deep fryers.  For a short time, the full time maintenance person was a young man with a peculiar name:  Aqualica.  He was obviously of Asian descent.

I asked him once what country he was from and he told me he had been born on a boat in the middle of the ocean.  He either didn’t know or didn’t want to tell me what heritage his parents had.  I let it drop.

It wasn’t very long before my assistant manager, Kerri, was complaining that Aqualica was saying odd things to her.  He called her his “daughter” and told her that he had thousands of children all over Europe.  (He was only in his twenties at this time.)  I had to tell him to stop saying stuff to her like that.

One morning, Aqualica had his nametag changed to “Emmanuel”.  I asked him why.  He said that was his name.  The next week, it was something different.  I told him to pick a name and stick with it.  I was NOT about to revise what I called him every other day.  I didn’t care which name it was, but I needed him to be consistent.  Shirly, one of the other crew members, said she like Emmanuel better; “Aqualica” made her think of “Aqua Lung”.

A couple weeks later, Aqualica was supposed to be at work at 6am.  He didn’t show, and he didn’t call.  He finally came in at about 8:30.  I asked him what had happened.  He said that he was in his house, looking out his front window, when all of a sudden,  some aliens showed up.  They took him away…who knows where?  He finally got away from them, and as soon as he could, he came to work.   This happened several times; however, the story changed from aliens taking Aqualica away, to God interfering with his day.

These odd incidents were becoming more and more frequent, and the young man wasn’t ceasing to say things to my assistant.  I had to make a decision.  His actions were alarming, and I had 30 other people to protect.  I decided that we needed to “part ways”.

A year or so later, I was reading the local “court cases” in our daily Associated Press newspaper, The Daily World, when I saw a headline that made me curious:  “God speaks to the jury, too”.  Turns out that this same young man, Aqualica, had taken after someone with a large tool (if I remember right, it was a heavy crescent wrench) and hit them over the head multiple times.  Apparently, he tried to make the court believe that God had told him to do this.  The jury wasn’t buying it, and he was convicted. 

A few years later, Jack in the Box introduced a new set of videos to show to new hires at Orientation.  One of the videos was how to recognize the signs of, and how to prevent, violence in the workplace.  That video could have been a manual of all the things we dealt with when Aqualica worked there.  The video even specified that if a person tells us that “God or Aliens” have told them to do something, beware.   At that point, we could look back on what had happened and laugh, because we were no longer in danger.  This was the confirmation I needed, however, to know that I had done the right thing with Aqualica, for the protection of the crew and the customers.