I thought Lark was the worst social media manager I ever worked with, but his replacement, Danny Medina, was so much worse in ways our agency could have never imagined.
This two-faced freak proved to be a very savvy social media criminal.
It proved a costly hire for my boss — quite literally.
Danny was a short Latino man in early thirties with dark hair he styled in a strange pompadour. He wore denim jackets and pretended to be cool always smiling giving a thumbs up to everyone and he would call people “brother.”
It seemed so phony to me like he was trying too hard.
He also pretended to be a church-going, religious person and even said he sang in a traveling choir. I think that was a strategy to endear him to my boss who is deeply religious.
Something about Danny, his odd, overfriendly behavior as if he was sizing us up, gave me the creeps from the start.
However, he even had me fooled initially, as he pretended to be a capable social media manager although he had little or no experience. Yet could pull off just enough to keep our boss fooled with lame posts.
Soon after, he wasn’t communicating with me and he also had no knowledge or idea how to leverage my PR and media results in our client’s social media pages just as with his predecessor Lark.
Some of our clients began bitterly complaining about Danny’s work, but he would quickly blame the clients. Now, this is a difficult thing for me to say, but in this case, our clients were right about Danny’s lame work.
Another odd thing I noticed, is that each work day Danny wandered far from our office wearing earbuds and talking on his phone sometimes for hours at a time. I would see him walking when I went to a nearby Starbucks for coffee. Yet he never stayed late to make up for his lost time. He always left around 5 p.m. like the other Millennials around our office.
We are both NBA fanatics and Danny tried to befriend me that way, too. He even invited me to a Lakers game which I refused. Even then something told me that no way was I hanging out with this freak.
My boss began to complain about Danny checking out on his job. Danny told him he was heartbroken about his girlfriend that had recently left him and went back to Chicago where he was also from. His mind not being on his social media job was apparently was all a ruse, too.
In another sickening development, Danny had befriended Code Boy and used to call him brother and they would give each fist bumps and high fives in the office.
Even worse, Code Boy and Lydia used to invite Danny to their fake team lunches. That gave me pause. Think about it. They hated me so much they would rather invite a creepy criminal to their fake lunches than me. It truly showed me the lack of character and true shallowness of Code Boy and Lydia, my unfortunate so-called co-workers.
Talk about a diseased culture.
Pretty crazy.
Danny’s gig was finally up about seven months into his employment.
My boss started to discover social media advertising charges for Facebook and Instagram ads that he hadn’t authorized.
Actually, Danny had started his own NBA fan/news business on Instagram and Facebook using our boss’s credit card business to fund his new operation.
My boss also discovered Danny would use our office and address and even pictures of our office to convince people to sign up for his service and company,
All in all, he eventually stole about $2,000 from our company.
When my boss got suspicious, Danny had already gone home for the night.
Danny didn’t show up the next day at work as he must have realized he had been found out as my boss wanted to meet with him about the mysterious charges.
Danny disappeared and we never saw him again. We figured he had done this at many businesses across the country and we were only his latest victim.
Shortly after he left, we also began receiving mysterious emails from someone pretending to be our boss asking members of our agency to buy gift cards from Best Buy and send them to him. We have no proof it is Danny, but I wouldn’t put it past him.
Even this past week we got an inquiry from a minor league baseball team back east that said we had contracted with them to provide advertising services.
Only one problem. Our agency had no knowledge of it. Danny had created a fake email while at our agency to fraudulently use our company to contract services with this minor league team.
Not too long ago, someone also stole money out of our bosses’ business bank account. We are not sure if it is Danny but you never know.
One night after the whole thing went down, I had a strange conversation with Code Boy, who said it was too bad about Danny. He seemed sadder to me that he lost a fake friend than pissed about a lying criminal who had stolen a lot of money from his father.
Goes to show that you can never tell about people. I’ve had my reservations about social media managers in general, but I never figured anything like this.
Embezzlement?
The sad part is we never found Danny to file charges against him. The authorities are still looking for him as well.
Danny is still out there somewhere trying to steal money from other unsuspecting victims.
Unfortunately, after Danny’s departure, my boss continued his familiar pattern of hiring inexperienced people for our agency’s social media services.
Sophia, a former Latina waitress in her late twenties, who recently graduated from college with little social media experience, was hired as our social media manager. She was actually supposed to be an intern in my PR department but we didn’t have any openings at the time. Unfortunately, Sophia has also proved to be somewhat clueless and uncommunicative and even goes on team lunches with Code Boy and Lydia.
She was somewhat friendly before the lunches, but now she despises me, too. I am not sure why as I have never been mean or harsh toward her at all. Sophia is also wary if I try to speak to her like she is afraid I will hit on her or something even though I have always been very professional and courteous toward her. Must be Lydia’s backstabbing poison again and maybe the lingering BS from the Brazilian Incident.
Sophia is smarter than Lark, although that is not saying much, and she isn’t trying to embezzle funds like Danny.
So I guess you could call that progress.
Life in Public Relations Hell 