Employee fired after using bag of chips to skip work

An electrician used a bag of chips to conceal his location in order to play golf at times rather than work during the last two years, a complaint alleged.

Tom Colella, 60, who has worked for Aroona Alliance for two decades and makes $110,000 a year, went golfing at least 140 times in the past two years, the complaint said, according to the Australian Financial Review.

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Colella would place his personal data assistant inside a foil bag of chips as a type of “Faraday cage” -- which blocks electromagnetic frequencies --  to conceal his location, Australia’s Fair Work Commission found.

“(Colella was) deliberate in trying to hide his whereabouts and deceive his employer,” Bernie Riordon, commissioner of the committee, said. "I can find no plausible explanation why Mr. Colella would create a Faraday cage around his PDA, except to obstruct the GPS collecting capacity of the device. Mr. Colella appears to have been deliberately mischievous in acting in this manner."

The company said that Colella lied about his location for 21 days in April 2016. His PDA indicated that he was at home when he claimed to have been working at a water treatment site.

Colella said the device suffered a glitch and offered phone records in his defense, according to the Financial Review.

The commission found Colella was working many of those days in question. However, he did not call in alarms on jobs he was supposedly working on during two different days.

"I find that Mr. Colella was not performing the work on these days that he has claimed and for which he was paid,” Riordon said, concluding that the firing was fair.

Colella is now working as an Uber driver.

Cox Media Group