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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_Wall |
Like the businesses I "manned" for other people who were often too incompetent to do so themselves, I'd just as often run into the walls of their ineptitude as quickly. Can't speak up? Force your underpaid minion to attend (that'd be me running your meeting better than you), for half the price. Having trouble with new ideas, concepts, technologies, and their executions? That's OK! Pretend superiority over your resident genius (I knew that, BTW) by airily flaunting your laziness with over-dramatic sighs that express your disturbed "businessman of importance" state of mind, someone with the weight of the world pressing down on his shoulders (like, paperwork related to book manufacturing), while passing off the real work that you are "too busy" to do onto the people in your workflow who are actually qualified in the industry, you ignorant hack, and when we do excel, feign indifference and ignorance while you check my email every 10 minutes because the office handbook said you could do so. Hi, there!
And so, when the last business I worked at full-time imploded on itself, after I fixed it on their deliberately abusive shoestring budget (which was my job to do), I simply sat back and watched the kooks kill each other off, in the calm wake that follows on the footsteps of my excellent leadership. I grew accustomed to a quick headcount of firings that I'd metaphorically mount in my office at the beginning of every new venture, one that naturally expanded outward to include environments I visited for my hobbies, too. Magnetic personalities draw out the crazies who need a strong identity to stalk around in an openly mad way, or else they are rootless, restless, and increasingly psychotic.
Of course, that means I have to support the weight of a thousand poisoned darts aimed at me at all times, and if I don't properly manage your psychotic house rat, she'll go batshit and tear into your throat, and since you're a coward, well....that just won't do, will it? Word quickly spread throughout my industry of choice (and now, to the wider world) that if a manager didn't fend off their own troubled employees, I fought back like a normal, healthy, high-performing muthfucka, which means you get canned wayyyy before I do, and with your prescription healthcare plan (that I pay for) you need a steady supply of pills for your cocktail of meds, or it will bring on serious withdrawal like the fucking junkie you really are, so I set my internal clock and wait.
Within weeks, the worst headcases "flip" on one another, like addicts trying to cop a plea for a better deal with the D.A. for a reduced prison sentence. It's become routine. At first, I was shocked when the last crazy little Jewish man I worked for (with the serious Napolean complex) decided to try and frame his rabid bitch of a secretary's schizo-bipolar behavior as some sort of "catfight" happening between us, I knew he was "in" on the office scams with her. Ah. Probably his mistress or a relative...or both, because they're so fucking weird. So what? Whatever crazy shit he and his freaks did behind closed doors meant nothing to me professionally. He smirked his phony bullshit suggestions at me, like putting up a bead curtain to give me some "privacy" when I told him she would attack in a continually more aggressive and openly aberrant way because she stopped taking her pills, on suggestion of a cult she attended called "Landmark", one that she actively recruited for within the office during daytime business hours and in between the calls they placed to her all day every day for recruitment purposes on the company's dime and office phone lines.
It broke at least seven workplace laws that I knew of as a layperson just after my first few seconds of thought, and that was without any outside legal counsel. After that, things went downhill fast. He thought he was going to see a "hot" girl-fight in action between me ("the hotness") and his weak, limp cunt of a receptionist. Not happening. I simply brushed up on modern OSHA standards about legal office behavior, after his legal publishing experienced nephew ganged up on me with their insanely gay production guy. I beat them with a few slips of paper I printed out minutes before our "meeting", and that was with them monitoring my every move over the company's computer network wired by the publishers' own son. Oh. Yeah, it's like that.
He grew fretfully desperate, because his fake yellow-haired bitch hatched a new evil ploy for stalking me in his office for every counter-move I made; that's how powerless he was with a typical office slut who traded on blow jobs over any real talent or work ethic. I knew I had everything I needed when they actually built a little fucking wall to obscure me from her increasingly paranoid stomping up-and-down the company hallways, just to get a glimpse of me during her ferociously psychotic break from reality. His simpering cripple of a crazy wife came back to see me in my newly-altered studio space (which she rarely did, so she could telegraph her obvious rich housewife disdain for "laborers" like me at every opportunity she had), with a strategy delivered in a fake, loud, stage voice (you know, because of my "hearing" problems): did I feel "better" with the wall in place?
Her typical condescension at having to even interact with a beautiful human like me made my flesh crawl, but since this was her big gay Broadway moment, I didn't want to let her down. Oh, yes! I smiled with my best phony bitch impression. It's soooo much better back here now. Her face caved in, and then she recovered quickly, pasting on another sickly smile. Oh, good! Psychologically, I bet this really helps you out. Yes, crazy bitch with the lying cheating family living in a nest of vipers. Your crazy lesbian mistress/sex worker/receptionist with the obvious mood swings is why you built a wall to block me from her crazy eyes, so I definitely think about $60 worth of particle board and spackle (that I actually helped the contractor put up, which was greeted with more derision by his nephew with the phrase "boy, you sure do seem to know your materials" line along with the information that he has a "gay best friend" he told me about on his very first day of his employment in a phony gushy TMI-kind of way) will cure her of paranoid schizophrenic bipolar obsessive compulsive personality identity disorder. Any day now. Should happen...right about....now....no...it never happened. Still no cure for you.
A recent ex-neighbor of mine who's also clearly troubled but can occasionally speak "human" back to me on his "good" days, laughed with me one warm spring afternoon last year, when he let me know that our resident fake blonde psycho-bitch wanted to draw an imaginary white line down the middle of a house that she merely rents space in, because every cave troll has to have its toll paid, and since I don't do that (because I'm not mentally ill to a room-bound recluse off her meds), I no longer have access to "her" side staircase to the back of the residence that the rest of the household can use, because she imagined a fake history between use. And don't you know, mes amis, I could practically see her erecting a crazy brick wall (made with the landlord's bricks and carried out on his property) behind my back? <sigh> Here we go again. I wonder who will win, don't you? No? Huh. Neither do I.
Fight back, friends. Our collective knowledge is power: https://www.osha.gov/
"No one should have to sacrifice their life for their livelihood,
because a nation built on the dignity of work must provide safe working
conditions for its people."- Secretary of Labor Thomas E. Perez
