It’s (a day late) The Thursday Thumb-Twiddler.
1. You’re driving late at night through a deserted but safe neighborhood. Suddenly, a dog darts out in front of your car and you hit it. Do you stop to see how injured it is? If you found it was dead, and had a tag with the owner’s address and phone number, what would you do?
This actually happened to me once, just out of high school. Major thoroughfare through town, dog darted out, boom, went a few blocks, turned the corner (should I stop? should I just go on? no, gotta stop!), parked, got out, saw that some other folks had gathered around the dog, got back in my car, and went on. Nothing I could do at that point (and what the hell were they doing letting their dog run loose near such a major street?) and even though it wasn’t my fault, I didn’t feel like I could bear to see what had happened, or what the folks there would say.
Still feel sick about it.
If there was nobody around — yeah, I think I’d feel obligated to see more closely what had happened, and to contact the owners, painful as that would be. I’d do it, because I’d hope someone would do the same for me with one of my pets.
2. Your job makes you privy to the fact that your company is illegally dumping toxic material. An anonymous tip to the authorities isn’t likely to produce any results. Do you risk your job by publicly bringing your firm’s crimes to the attention of the authorities?
Since my company does get involved, secondarily, with things like waste clean-up, this hypothetical could become very real.
I think I would pursue it internally to begin with — see if local management was aware, then report it up through our Integrity Hotline. Despite (or, the cynic would say, because of) our rather, ah, highly-margin-conscious corporate culture, our company also has, I feel, a strong ethical strain about it as well, and I think action would be taken.
If not … then, yeah, I’d blow the whistle. Getting a new job in this economy wouldn’t be easy, but I couldn’t stand by and see people get hurt that way.
3. If you were sent on assignment to rate the ten best small towns in America, what particular criteria would be the most important to you?
Schools. Unemployment rates. Access to larger cities and transportation hubs. Telecommunication access. Crime rates. Population growth/decline.