I worked with a Ron. Guy was a royal pain in the ass. The Big Boss use to call him the asshole.
He had to get some insurance papers filled out for an “operation” he was having. He would not tell us what typ of operation. When the doctor’s office called our office and I spoke to them, I asked “Yes, and what was that operation for again?”
When I was told “hemmeroids,” I managed to wait till I hung up before laughing my own ass off. I told everybod in person what was going on, and we all laughed our asses off repeatedly.
Quite the opposite in terms of mental health. It is generally accepted that people with low self-esteem are more likely to feel schadenfreude than are people who have high self-esteem. This is due to the fact that the only way they think they can look better is to enjoy the failures of others.
you know that video of a carload of teens driving around, and a kid in the back seat opens the door to try to knock someone off of their bicycle, and ends up getting a faceful of a parked car’s bumper instead?
yeah, that. I don’t care how badly that kid got fucked up, he had it coming.
One of my pet peeves while driving is someone racing up beside me to cut in when there’s plenty of room for them to merge in behind me. So if I see that it’s going to happen I will speed up. If that makes me a bad driver, tough. Deal with it.
I’m approacing a stop light where I’m going to turn left. Butt-munch is racing up in the right lane and I just know he’s going to cut in just in time to slam on his brakes for the light. I speed up just enough that he won’t be able to make it so he brakes hard and whips in behind me. Then the moron crosses into the oncoming traffic lane, runs the red light, and turns left. The schadenfreude was thick and rich when the officer flipped on his lights and followed him through. When the light changed I did not attempt to refrain from pointing and laughing as I passed him.
On my commute, there is a highway that always backs up for a few miles. Along this one section, lots of drivers travel up the shoulder in order to get up to the intersection sooner, and turn right. It’s right next to a strip center, and cars politely leave openings for traffic to turn into the strip center.
One day a guy was driving up the shoulder, and a car t-boned him as it was turning into the driveway. He ended up in a ditch.
Many years ago, during the food service phase of my employment, the fast food joint where I was employed was sold to a new franchisee. He came in with his own management team and basically managed to piss off the entire staff.
Fast forward two months, half the staff has quit and only about half of those have been replaced. The manager starts complaining about the staffing issues and the poor result on our health inspection and I say something I probably shouldn’t have. One minute later, I need a new job.
Fast forward another four months and I pull through the drive through of this same restaurant. The owner spots me and waves me over to a parking stall and then comes out to chat with me. He wants to offer me my old job back with a 20% raise and wants me to take over their training program. It turns out that the manager, after having successfully driven off the worthwhile employees, managed to get caught stealing and filing false paperwork. He was almost begging for help and I turned him down.
Believe it or not, I had a huge smile on my face as I went on my way.
Short and sweet: whenever it’s snowy, and I’m inching down the highway carefully in my wee car, and all the cars on the side of the road are four-wheel-drive-SUVs, it’s schadenfreude time.
Company 1 hires me at a $7k raise to go into Company A and manage the deployment of a new software system. I show up there on day 1 to find the most disorganized half-ass very much deserves to fail hellhole on the face of the Earth and have another guy say “Oh, I was hired for that job too. You’re #6 now.” Company was so disorganized that they had 60 consultants under one incompetent manager, most of us doing nothing and this jackass screaming at us in meetings telling us that we should be figuring out what needs to be done and doing it without his direction.
After about a month of doing nothing and being irritated by being hired under false pretenses, I complain to the owner of my consulting firm. He then calls me into the office and, without having the character to ever look me in the eye, tells me there is something wrong with me as a human being and puts me on probation under a complete asshole, to report daily at another site to this guy. Apologizes to Company A for my behavior (They went “what the fuck are you talking about, he’s great!”). After a week of dealing with Asshole, I completely ignore him and do my work, earning great kudos from Company A. Douchebag owner keeps trying to call me to congratulate me, and even stops by once in person, but without any effort on my part, I am serenipitously not there every single time.
I find another job and quit by fax, still refusing to speak to douchebag, who then threatens to NOT pay me for the previous two weeks until I threaten to sue, at which point he suddenly claims it was all a misunderstanding and that he never meant to threaten me.
Flash forward a year. I get a call from a recruiter. How would I like to go back to Company 1 and help them rebuild? Douchebag promoted Asshole to the head of Consulting, and in less than one year, every single consultant quit, even the new ones they were hiring to replace the departing ones. The company is dead. I told the story of my departure. Recruiter gets very solemn and tells me that he has heard similar stories from everyone, and had he known about this shit, he would have never taken the job himself.
Company 2; I’m hired for another implementation project. I tell them straight out that if the project isn’t underway in 6 months, I’m out the door. I sit on my ass most of the time and they try to shift me to other projects in the mean time. I depart at the 7 month mark, to a lot of slander and general badmouthing about how I didn’t hang in there.
Three months after I depart, the entire 125 person division is axed.
Company 3; I’m now working as a Security Supervisor at Company B. My boss has gone from championing me, to repeated attempts to frame and fire me for unknown reasons. Three of us get together and file complaints with the company about him. My complaint is three pages long. HR at our local sub-office rallies around the supervisor and we all depart.
Six months later I walk into a building to do a pickup from my armored job and there’s one of the company’s roving supervisors working there. I ask him how things are at my Company B. Seems about 3 months after I left, they had to go in and fire every last person working there and replace them all. What about Boss man? “We shitcanned him.” I also find that the company closed the sub-branch and fired or laid off all the HR people there.
This is rather lame compared to previous comments, but one of my first jobs, in my late teens, was as secretary to the president of a business school. Me: young, naive, lacking self-confidence, you know. Him: cold, glum, brusque, critical. (Yes, it was a bad match, though I was a whiz at typing, taking dictation, etc., I was probably an ill fit). He clearly thought I was an ignorant dummy and practically heaved a sigh of irritation whenever I dared come into his office. He didn’t do anything ‘bad’, he just wasn’t at all friendly, just barked orders all day long, and it got to the point where I quit and got a job working with actual human beings. A few years later I read he was arrested for running off with all the money from all those single moms signing up with his school.
Ye. There was an anormous run on"pain-in-the-ass" jokes that day.
My Ron’s name was Ron. He was a Ron’s Ron.
The best laugh I ever got at work: At the time of this incident, I was in the Big Boss’s office. The phone rang, and it was Dr. White, Ron’s protolgist. The BB was knew a Dr. hite, which led to the following exchange:
BB: Heelo, XYZ Real Estate.
Doctor’s Office: Is Ron there.
BB: No, he is not. May I help you.
DO: Please have him call Dr. White’s office.
BB: Is that Dr. White the veteranian?
I was a voluntary patient in a locked psych/rehab facility that was supposed to be enlightened and modern but had just been a behavior mod reward-and-punishment joint, and I’d had my fill of it. I told them I wanted to leave. (They allegedly had an informal policy that if you asked you would be released right then and not held for the maximum 72 hours beyond). They said “wait here while we get your paperwork” and instead came back with stretcher and loaded needle and put me in seclusion.
I had one-on-one nursing care assigned to me during the resulting standoff while I was in the seclusion room. The day nurse was friendly but when she went off-shift I got this young woman who came in very cautiously and sat as far away from me as possible and ignored me. If I said anything to her she’d jump and then answer in short little phrases.
I gave up trying to talk to her after awhile and tried to meditate. There were a lot of random sounds coming in through the door to the seclusion room and I had a hard time tuning them out. Finally I stood up and pushed the door, and it swung closed and latched. It latched with a rather final chunking sound and she looked up in terror and immediately tried to reopen it and it would not reopen. It was locked from the outside. Her eyes widened. “Sorry”, I said, not feeling as sorry as I thought I should probably feel if I were a nicer person. “I didn’t realize it was set to lock a person in. That should have occurred to me, I just wasn’t thinking.”
She didn’t reply to me at all but rose to her feet, facing me the entire time, pushed the intercom button, and waited 4 seconds or so then pressed it again and held it down. Someone finally squawked something and she said in rapid clipped tones, “This is the nurse on the seclusion watch and I am locked in with the patient please come let me out the door is locked”. There was a squawked reply. She sat up real straight and tall with one finger still on the call button for several minutes. Time went by. I did her the favor of ignoring her for maybe 10 minutes and then looked over at her. “So…”, I said, smiling at her with my best lazy grinning smile, “…what does it feel like, to be locked up in a place you can’t get out of, and scared of what the people there might do to you?”
A little thing: I was driving down the freeway in a very rural and people-free region in the Sierras, going pretty fast cause the freeway was empty and it was fun. I’d guess I was going about 75 or so - above the speed limit, but hardly insane. Anyway, this dude drove past me at like 100 mph and I have to admit I was a bit peeved at him, just because it was dangerous to drive that fast on the winding mountain road.
It was pleasing to see him on the side of the road, talking to a CHP officer about ten minutes later.
A bigger (but still completely petty) thing: When I was in seventh grade, I was second chair flute in the school band, putting me ahead of all of the eighth graders except for (obviously) the first chair, this girl Molly. Molly was totally bitchy about it because this was much higher than she’d been when she was in seventh grade. She would whine to other people about how seventh graders should sit in the second row - right in front of my face. Because I had yet to acquire the confrontational demeanor that I later developed, I basically sat through all of this for a year, silently stewing and loathing her. She was a total bully and mean and nasty. We didn’t go to the same high school though, so I didn’t see her again for years.
When I DID see her again, it was in college. I walked past her on a path and did a total double-take. It had been ages and I wasn’t totally sure it was her. I looked her up in the school directory and sure enough - she was a student at my university now. But now I was a senior and she was a junior. Somehow, I was now a year ahead of her. Probably some kind of major academic failure due to being a complete bitch, I figure.
When I was in grade school, 2nd-4th grade about, I was occasionally bullied by one “Phillip”. He was a bit slow, had flunked at least once, as so was bigger than me by far. It was no fun, but I wasn’t psychologically scarred or ever really physically hurt by it. After not seeing him for several years, when I was about 14-15y/o, I bumped into him at a public swimming pool. I just had to smile, look down at him and say, “hi, Phillip!”. I felt the best revenge was showing that the indignities I was subjected to were no so severe as to need substantive revenge.
When I was deployed in Bosnia, I was assigned to move a truck from one side of the camp to the other. Since all vehicled moved in the camp were required to have a ground guide, there was another medic with me. Well, after giving inscutable guide signals to me when I was driving, then refusing to heed my signals when we switched places, I had had enough. After he guided me into another truck (really? You were ten feet away! You couldn’t tell I was going to hit it?), I had had enough and walked off. Our platoon sergeant was right there and finished the job with him. About a week later, this guy puts a truck into a ditch during a convoy. Not simply bogged, he put it on its side and it required salvage vehicles to get it out! Additionally, since were were the support batallion’s medical company and our call signs were various iterations of “Witch Doctor”, he had to endure “ditch doctor” jokes for the next month!
Dealing a tournament, the table gets short and the participants decide they would like to chop the purse. The tournament director starts the paperwork after confirming that they want to chop. Then one player pipes up, “We’re not doing an even chop, are we?”. I told him, “That’s up to you guys. It’s your money. As long as the proposal is agreed upon by all, we don’t really care how you divide it up. If no agreement can be reached, the tourney is played out.” Well, I call the director back over and she says it has to be an even chop and walks off. The looks I got from those guys! There’s much mumbling and some are getting pissed. I better say something before this gets out of hand. “Wait guys, you’re right. I’m sure this is just a misunderstanding.” I call the director over again and try to talk to her. She’s brusque and dismissive of me. Since the chop means the end of the tourney, the table is closed and I’m sent to a ring game. But, not before I’m chewed out by my floor supervisor for “questioning the tournament director”. I didn’t get written up . . . unfortunately. A few weeks later, the tourney director is fired for stealing from the tourneys’ purses. In the investigative fallout, the cardroom manager also leaves (don’t know if he was fired or resigned). I wish I had been written up. Documentary proof that I questioned this supervisor’s actions might have helped when I had applied to internal audit. No matter, I got my transfer to audit anyway!
