I’m bending down to pick up hundreds of CDs scattered across the floor and I am angry that I am doing it. On one hand the bastard who did this should be made to clean up this mess but on the other hand I realistically know that’s not going to happen and my boss who is in her 50’s and just weeks away from knee replacement surgery is practically the only one cleaning up. I can’t let her do this on her own even if I hate the reason why we’re doing it. I have a sense of what’s right unlike the person who left the room this way minutes earlier.
It was around 5pm and the building was empty except for me and my boss who was a few rooms over. I was on my computer at my desk and listening to the end of the United States/Finland Olympic hockey game. The U.S. had the game well in hand and my mind began to drift from work to my plans for the evening. I was going to go see Shutter Island with a few friends and I was very excited. Suddenly there were raised voices coming from the room my boss was in. She was arguing with the son of the owner. He’s the Executive Vice President of the company but he’s a spoiled child who thinks he’s entitled to everything and has a hissy fit whenever he hears the word no. Little did I know how bad his fit today would be.
It’s all about a battle of 2 companies in 1 company. I know what you are thinking, that doesn’t make sense. Basically he is trying to take over everything from within and we have been and continue to be in his sights. So we fight for survival but in reality our fight has been pointless. His father and the rest of the company say they are on our side and show sympathy towards us but no one will tell him no or stand up to him.
To summarize, we used to be one happy company. He would buy merchandize for us (with his father’s money) and we would sell it. He’d buy a little for himself as well but it would be specific items and not really in conflict with what we were doing. Then a few years back he began to get greedy and upset. My boss rejected his crazy ideas one too many times and he became spiteful. He turned into Fredo Corleone from the Godfather. He wanted respect because of who his father (the owner and creator of the company) was but as we all know respect can only truly come from who you are, not what your last name is. He stopped coming to us with ideas and went straight to his father, pointing out every little thing we were doing wrong, even if what we were doing wasn’t really all that wrong. He’d say there was a better way to do it and we won’t listen to him. Over time he convinced his father he was onto something and he had that better way and then he started his own large scale online sales company. Now why a company needs 2 separate online sales companies selling the same things, I’ll never know but for the last 2 years it’s been this way.
This past year has been the roughest with at least half our staff being let go and with him getting 90% of the merchandise bought “for the company”. You’d think his father, if he wouldn’t say no to him would close us down and be done with it but for some reason he doesn’t want to give his son everything… although most times it seems like it. The latest blow is that he is giving his son the building our crew has been in for a decade or more doing our thing. First he steals our business, now he is going to steal our building. We showed this failed idiot how to do online business now he is taking it all from us. It must be nice. It must be nice to have someone else take all the risks, show you the way and then you ride the thing home when you realize it’s safe. Let’s also mention that with our crew, the father gets all the profit, but his son’s business seems a little more complicated. I’m not sure how much the father is getting back but you can be sure the son is keeping a chunk for himself. Meanwhile I’ve seen friends lose their jobs because of greed and ego.
So the end result is we are now moving into the same building as our Main and Lafayette record store. It’s a smaller space but we have a smaller crew so maybe it could work. Hopefully being in a different building would mean seeing less of this douche and being free to do things without him telling his daddy that we’re selling things too cheap, or too fast or too slow or whatever else he can find wrong. So where were we?
I’m sitting at my desk and I hear the raised voices and I’m thinking oh crap. He’s getting our building but he wants to move in immediately. Meanwhile we have 30,000 things for sale online. You can’t physically move that much stuff without some time. We have been working on it all week but of course a 1-2 month job should be a 1-2 day job in the eyes of someone lacking reason and logic. His opinion is that we should leave all of our merchandise behind for him. That would get us over there quicker, lol. Then his brainstorm was that we should move out right away and then he would make sure we’d get 70% of our stuff back after he organized it. Again that’s laughable in that he would simply take all the best stuff and give us the less desirable items. Unfortunately his father didn’t think that idea was so bad earlier this week and the son thought he had a sucker but then when the old man discussed it with my boss and a company vice president they saw the idea for what it was, a way for him to steal a bunch of good stuff from his dad and sabotage us at the same time. Miraculously they told him no. Needless to say, he was not pleased.
The raised voices turned to outright screaming within seconds and then I heard a loud glass shattering crash. I jumped up from my desk and walked 2 rooms over into a larger area where the son was yelling at my boss, a company vice president and his father, the old man himself. He heard me come rushing into the room and screamed my name; “ED! DON’T YOU HAVE TO LIST?” Listing is the act of listing items online for sale, which is what I was doing prior to the spectacle. I looked at him coldly. He rephrased the question again screaming at me and basically telling me that I should be at my desk working. I didn’t say a word but I did raise my right hand and showed him a single finger.
I came into the room wondering if he had hurt my boss but there were actually 3 people in the room with him including the top 2 people in the company. Would that matter? He continued to scream back and forth with my boss and then in a fit of rage he grabbed boxes of brand new CDs from a colleague’s desk and threw it across the room. CDs were flying everywhere. He grabbed another box, and then a cardboard tray full of more CDs and flung it. Suddenly hundreds of CDs were all over the floor. He temporarily stormed out with a barrage of screaming and insults.
I remember thinking I was happy his father could bear witness to this. I had encountered this spoiled brat doing this a few times, although not to this extent. In a way I thought this was great. Everyone who mattered could see him for the psycho he is. Maybe he’d hang himself today.
I walked across some of the wreckage to see if my boss was alright because most of the venomous tirade was directed at her. Then the son storms back into the room screaming and throwing around more stuff. He grabbed shopping carts full of merchandise and threw them over. He grabbed more boxes and trays of CDs and threw them on the floor and actually some landed on his 80-something year old father’s foot although he didn’t seem hurt or anything. He grabbed a ceramic mug and smashed it on the wall, then grabbed an apple and threw that into a wall while screaming and with fire coming out of his eyes. Forgive me for saying this but I started to hope he’d stroke or have an attack of some kind. I’d never seen someone flip out like that ever. On one hand it was really scary because he was capable of doing anything to anyone but on the other hand it was the saddest, sorriest display I’d ever seen. This was a baby throwing a tantrum because he wasn’t getting what he wanted. This was someone who felt entitled screaming MINE! like a child.
After he finished trashing the 2nd room he glared at us with demonic intensity. He screamed at me again; “ED! YOU SHOULD BE WORKING RIGHT NOW! YOU SHOULD BE AT YOUR DESK!” I didn’t reply. I looked a hole through him. I was both scared and angry. Would he attack me? If I said something to him he might. If he attacked me though it would be the biggest mistake of his life because I would defend myself and I would have f-ed him up something fierce. After all the things he’s done to me or tried to do to me over the last few years there’s no one I despise more than this tool.
He wasn’t through with me yet. He didn’t get a response from me but he could probably tell by my face that I was very angry. He yelled “YOU LOOK LIKE YOU WANT TO SAY SOMETHING, YOU WANT TO SAY SOMETHING TO ME?” I didn’t move a muscle. “YOU WANT TO SAY SOMETHING?!?” Finally I replied; “Yeah, I want to say something”. Quickly his father turned to me and said “Don’t say anything”. It was like we were at the zoo and the zookeeper was telling us not to feed or provoke the animals.
The son realized that I wasn’t going to engage so after a few more screaming rants he departed this time for good. I took a look around at the damage. Hundreds of CDs were everywhere. Maybe a maybe DVDs were on the floor. Also a lot of books and all kinds of knick knacks were scattered about. My boss started to cry and was pleading with the old man that he does something about his son. He just seemed ambivalent about it on the outside. I’m sure he was upset, disappointed, embarrassed and who knows what else internally but he seemed so cold and distant on the outside. Maybe he was in disbelief.
I worked my way over to my boss who was bordering on hysterical and I gave her a big hug. While I did that I saw what made that initial glass breaking sound that sprung me from my desk and into the tirade. It was a laptop computer that one of my co-workers uses. He threw that at or towards my boss and it hit the wall and shattered. Add that into all the CDs that had cracked or smashed cases and he made well over a thousand bucks of damage. Plus now we’ll have to take all the damaged CDs offline because if the case is damaged they are not new. Yeah we can give it a new case but we’ll have to remove the factory seal to do it and that’s not something that can be replicated.
Was the police called? No. Was anything done right after this unfortunate incident occurred? Again no… but there was a huge mess to be cleaned up. I was of the opinion that the jerk that did it should be responsible to clean it, or maybe he should send some of his staff to clean up but that wasn’t going to happen no matter how much I wanted it to. My idealistic sense of honor was again rendered useless by an evil, evil man who never has to pay for what he does. It burns me but what can I about it. My presence alone in this company infuriates him so at least I have that going for me. (FYI- He’s tried to have me fired a few times but has no real authority over me so he was denied)
My boss settled down a bit, got it together and started to pick things up from the floor. The old man sat there… he’s nearly 90 so we weren’t expecting him to get on the floor and pick things up. The vice president was kind of talking with the old man and it was just my boss picking things up. I was supposed to leave but I called my friend and delayed my plans a little bit. I couldn’t leave her to pick everything up by herself. So we both were doing it and thankfully the building engineer showed up and helped out to so we got everything picked up in about a half hour.
As usual with this company nothing will come of this other than stories and blogs but this spoiled idiot is getting awfully close to going completely over the edge. Will it happen? It just might. We are moving out of our building to accommodate this fool but it appears that day when we are done can’t come fast enough. I hate that this evil man can get away with this crap constantly but it does make me happy to still be around to give him the finger every once in a while. People say why don’t you get another job? It’s not that easy. I have a loyalty to my boss and I know if I left it would be harder for her and our branch of the company to survive and I do take a measure of pleasure from the fact that my daily presence pisses the son off. I feel like in some way if I leave he wins. I know that’s not rational. In a darker sense, I think I also stay because I want to see the day when he melts down and digs his own grave. If today was any indicator that day may be coming.
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