Thank God You Got Out Of There Alive

In the early oughts, I worked at a small company. The owner was a classic narcissist. Nothing was ever good enough for him, and his standards for what was good enough changed about every hour. You’d give him some work product in the morning and it would be fantastic. You’d give him the same exact thing a few hours later and it would “need a lot of work.”

Two things happened to the guy before I left. First, he and his wife built a house in a rural area. The spot where they built their house used to be commonly used in the winter by snowmobilers and in the summer by dirt bikers. He decided to fence it off, and the recreationists didn’t like it, so they’d cut his fence and carry on through. He’d yell at them and threaten them, but nothing happened for a while.

Then, one time, after about two winters of this, he did his usual schtick of going out and yelling at them and threatening them with lawsuits and the police and the like, and one of the snowmobilers had had enough. That snowmobiler got off his ride, walked over, and beat the owner senseless. The owner pretty much hid in his office for the next two weeks. We eventually learned the entirety of the story, and nobody had much sympathy for him.

A year or two later, I ended up leaving the company. The owner demanded that I stay for four months to “train my replacement.” I politely reminded him that Washington is an At-Will employment state, and the two weeks I was offering him were a courtesy, not a legal requirement. Initially, all seemed well, but he spent two days trying to give me new work that was going to take months to complete. I kept reminding him that I wouldn’t be there to finish anything and it would be a better use of my time to transition my existing work to other people. He kept blowing up at me. I’d had enough, handed over my keys, and left.

That’s not even the best story, though. About two or three years after I’d left, the owner was in the newspaper. Yep, it was that recreational trail again. This time, he went out in his pickup truck to confront a dirt biker, and rather than bravely staying inside his truck and yelling threats at them as he usually did, he used that truck to run over the dirt biker. With the dirt biker on the ground with a broken arm, the owner then bravely emerged from the truck and threatened the guy (a teenager) with an axe, and then called the police. When the police arrived, they gave the kid a ticket and put him in an ambulance… and they promptly arrested the owner for assault with a deadly weapon (the truck).