Definition: Given a real-life anecdote of a complex ethical situation, generate a suitable title that describes the main event/root cause of the situation. Imagine that the given text is a social media post, and you have to write the title of the post, so the users can decide to read the main text or not.
Input:  

\[Apologies for the length, writing this turned out to be somewhat cathartic for me\]

I am a senior manager at a moderately well-known software firm in the Bay Area. A few years ago, I made a fateful decision to hire my wife’s younger brother (I will call him Jim, because every Jim I’ve ever known has been awesome)  after he approached me offering to work as a systems administrator. This was under the pretext that while he was doing well in his current company, he lacked growth opportunities and was seeking a change. By this point, Jim and I were best friends, we shared common interests and views, I was even best man at his wedding. I knew that he was more than skilled enough to handle the role so I gave him the job.

Things went pretty well for about a year, Jim helped on various projects and got along well-enough with everyone, but after a while things began to change. Jim would frequently miss work for various reasons, projects and commitments began to slip and overall results were getting worse and worse. I counseled Jim on multiple occasions trying to turn the behavior around and each time he would acknowledge the issue, and commit to correcting it. Unfortunately things only got worse, he began not showing up for work more regularly, often times without providing any notice of his absence which left project stakeholders asking me “Where’s Jim” pretty regularly. 

This peaked about 10 months after the problems began when Jim just went AWOL for an entire week - no warning, no phone call - just didn’t show up and didn’t answer calls. While I was initially worried for his safety, I found out through a mutual friend that he just wasn’t feeling well and couldn’t make it to work or even manage to contact us. When Jim returned to work the next week, I sat him down and put him on a formal performance plan under the direction of our department’s executive leadership and the company’s HR department. The plan was simply “show up on time, or contact us before your scheduled start time if you will not be showing up” with all of the standard HR speak about “failure to comply will lead to further disciplinary action, including termination of employment”. 

This seemed to correct the behavior for about three weeks, Jim was on time and working hard every day. Then on Monday of the fourth week, Jim just didn’t show up in the morning. My boss asked me what I planned to do and I said that I would find out if there was a reasonable explanation and make a determination based on that. When Jim appeared at the office around midday he said that he was sorry and that he had tried to send an E-mail the night before but the message got stuck in his phone’s outbox (Did I mention part of Jim’s role at the company was management of the E-mail systems…). Given the improvement I had seen in the past three weeks I asked my boss to let this slide as an honest mistake. Thursday of the same week rolled around, and there was no Jim to be found in the morning. Jim arrived again around midday with the excuse that his phone’s battery ran down and he missed his alarm. This was it, my boss asked me again what I planned to do and I immediately got with HR to begin an exit plan. 

Even through this, I tried to get Jim everything I could to soften the blow. I got him six weeks severance, and the ability to publicly resign so save face. John accepted the offer and left. 

This is where things get a little weird.

Jim seems to have lost his mind as a result, or was perhaps losing his mind already and I just noticed the results as poor work performance and lack of professionalism. Jim immediately took to trashing my character to anyone who would listen to him. He told family, and mutual friends alike that I had fired  him with no warning and without reason, he said that it was some “cold, calculated career move” with a goal of making me more money (I never understood how this was supposed to work). He even tried to convince my wife (his sister) of this crazy story and when she told him that she was fully aware of the issues he’d been causing at work Jim completely shut her out of his life and refused to talk to her again.

This continued on for a few years. My wife was furious at her brother and said she didn’t care to speak to him again, though I sensed she was also very sad about it. After some time though, I felt guilty that my wife lost her brother over this insanity and tried to find some way to at least get her back in contact with him. I found an ally in a mutual friend and after lots of effort managed to arrange a meeting for Jim, his wife, my wife and myself where I hoped we could finally bridge the gap.

That meeting eventually turned into one of the strangest social interactions of my life. After the initial small-talk was dispatched with we got to the matter at hand. Jim said that he was willing to just put everything in the past and move on like nothing ever happened as long as we never mentioned it again. Oh and this time he would totally not just shut his sister out for no reason at all. This did not satisfy my wife though and so we pressed a bit for some kind of explanation or acknowledgment of what happened. Anytime we would try to bring up any aspects of what happened, Jim’s behavior was bizarre - he would bury his face into his hands, he would gasp or groan like we were causing him physical pain, and when he could manage he would start to cry. Jim said that because he had been through a tough childhood, that he couldn’t talk about things that happened in his past at all because it just brought up to much other painful stuff from his past. His wife was very convinced by his display, patting him and rubbing his back to comfort him.

While it’s true that his childhood was tough as a result of an abusive narcissistic mother, that had absolutely nothing to do with what we were there to discuss. It also completely ignores the fact that my wife was in the same situation, arguably worse as the older sister. This whole theatrical display pissed my wife off something serious, she said that he was just blaming their (admittedly awful) mother for his failings and using their childhood as a shield from any responsibility. She said that if he can’t ever talk about or reflect on his past then it sounded like he could never be responsible for anything he ever did wrong and that people like that are dangerous like their mother. We have children now and my wife is determined to keep them away from her mother, and she now sees to much parallel in her brother’s behavior to risk staying in contact with him too.

So here I am /r/AmITheAsshole my wife has penned a farewell letter to her brother asking that he never again tries to contact her for any reason. I managed to convince her to not send that letter during the holidays, but that time has now passed and she is still resolved. I don’t know what else I could have done, but I feel guilty that my hiring Jim caused my wife to lose her brother. AITA?

&amp;#x200B;

**TL;DR**: I hired my wife’s brother Jim. Jim turned into a flake on the job. I fired Jim. Jim lost his mind. Jim wouldn’t speak to us for years. I Tried to reconcile. Jim contracted “past-itis”. My wife never wants to speak to Jim again. I feel like TA.

firing my brother