Hate you? No, more a sense of pity…

Remember the terrible mover who “helped” me? The owner called again today. He was mad and bashing his employees. He believed the driver for my job had run off with the paperwork and the check. He wanted me to see if the check had cleared the bank. He started letting the obscenities and f-bombs fly and I reigned him in.

“Sir, that language is absolutely unnecessary and unprofessional.”

“Well it’s obvious I’m more upset about this employee running off with your money than you are.”

“No sir, I just choose to use vocabulary with definitions actually related to the conversation.”

With that, he knocked off linguistic embellishments, but kept ranting how much he hated his employees and how worthless they are. He asked if I would like to personally ream one of them out; the second employee on my job was there. I reminded him that by now he should know that I care very little for rehashing and throwing fits over things already done. I’m much more interested in solutions.

“Did you call me to just vent about your poor hiring decisions or what?”

Ah, he wanted me to see if the check had cleared the bank. Fine, that was something I could do. I said I would do so and call him back. As I hung up I made note of the time. I suspected the problem would somehow, once again be related to the owner and not his employees.

Sure enough, about 20 minutes later the phone rang. He just went through some papers from last week and guess what? There was my paperwork and check. How utterly incompetent, topped off with a heaping case of blame-others-first. He concluded his call by saying, “I’m sure you hate me; you absolutely hate me.”

No, I was thinking more along the lines of pity. This man is his own greatest obstacle and he’s too busy blaming others to recognize it. I hope his employees take this as a profound encouragement to pursue a college education so they don’t have to work for people like this the rest of their lives.