two weeks pass...
So I don't sleep so good, I got terrible insomnia. I'm up at 2 AM every day. And when I'm up at 2 AM, I got 2 AM thoughts, and they're not always, like, happy, positive thoughts.
And today, I'm just fucking pissed about, like. This boss I had a fucking decade ago. I mean seriously, it was 10 years ago, for me to still be mad at him, that's irrationally angry. It's not just that, though, it's what I'm irrationally angry at him _for_.
I maen this guy, this guy was a real piece of shit. When people talk about "privilege", this guy could be the poster child for it. A lot of, you know, you see these incels talking about "alpha males" and they're thinking of people like him. And to me, this is a perfect example of why incels are fucked up, why incels have it wrong, because they buy into this bullshit idea. Because it's all superficial, it's all bullshit. He _looked_ like the kind of guy who would be successful. He was born into a powerful Republican political dynasty, white, silver hair, good teeth. The kind of guy dodgy car salesmen _try_ to look like.
He was born for success and he kept getting all kinds of opportunities, but he didn't succeed like some of his relatives did because he was a fucking grifter and a fraud. I mean even compared to his relatives. All Republicans are grifters and frauds to some extent, it's kind of baked into the ideology. IDK. I guess maybe it's irrationally that I should hate him at all compared to his less obviously evil brother. Because it is just a mask, right? Is it irrational to hate a guy who openly embezzles from his employees more than a guy who works to systemically unjust system in ways that _seem_ sensible and reasonable but aren't, really?
I guess if I hated him from embezzling from me personally, it would be rational. Except not a decade later, not when the amount of money he was embezzling from me was basically peanuts. But that's the thing, right? We're out here making fucking peanuts compared to his CEO-ass salary and he's embezzling from us _anyway_. And then goes off and literally sacks one of my most competent co-workers when she asked for a raise. Because she was _supposed_ to get one, the silent partners said hey, give your employees raises, and _that_ was what he embezzled. So he fired her because what she was asking her would have exposed his embezzling.
The thing is though I'm not really mad at him for that. I didn't know about any of this until long after I was out of there. He was mad at me for quitting. I mean he was fucking embezzling from us, I went out there and got a degree, he offered _nothing_ in return, and he was mad at me for quitting. Just, like, smdh. That ignorant-ass motherfucker. I'm not mad at him for that, either. To me that's hilarious levels of short-sightedness. You lose one of your best employees who you pay peanuts, who has worked hard and now has opportunities beyond what you can give them, and you're mad at _them_? This is, like, Frank Zappa being mad that Adrian Belew quits to work for someone who can pay _way_ the fuck more than he can. Like, what the fuck, you're the one always going on about how great capitalism is, and this _one time_ you wind up on the losing end of the stick and you're a little fucking bitch about it. You dumb motherfucker.
Like I said. I'm not even mad about this boss for that. I'm not mad about him taking a company that was not doing _great_ but which had a solid market niche and running it into the ground by being an asshole to all of the contacts the previous owner had carefully built up over the course of two decades. Nah, because the thing was, he and his partners were stupid to buy the company in the first place. The entire business model was built around the company having a patent on their one profitable product. There was nothing else in the pipeline. Nothing else to keep the company going. And the patent was about to expire. Of fucking course the owner was selling, because he knew there was no future to the company. The old owner was gonna take what he could and retire, and he was happy with that, because even though the company wasn't, like, fuckin' Amazon or anything, he'd been successful. The old owner worked hard and mostly been fair to other people and he had, you know, _enough_. Like he had that idea in his head, the idea of _enough_. The old owner didn't have to personally rule the world. Not the best guy in the entire world, this guy, but as small business owners go... I mean when people go around praising "small businesses", it's guys like him they're thinking of. I worked for him for seven years, and it was a good job. A good stable job that I worked hard at, and in return I had, like, the stability and the security to make something better of my life. I did that work, the job didn't, like, do anything to _support_ me in that. It just did the bare minimum necessary to allow me to do that.
And then this asshole took over and it went to total shit very fucking quickly. But the thing is, I'm not mad at him for _that_, either, because by the time he took over I'd done the work. I had what I needed. I was able to move on. Not smoothly or easily, but when I quit, a little over a year later I had moved on to better things. And this asshole... not only did he not get in the way of that, but by being such a grossly abusive fucking asshole, he gave me the motivation to pursue my dreams. So in a way I'm almost grateful to him, in a weird way, for being intolerably shitty. For being someone I couldn't _settle_ for. Because for me, I look at the absolute utter, utter minimum it takes me to survive, and I say "good enough", and I don't try for anything better. Because "good enough" is just so much better than anything I ever expected to have. That's the biggest reason why, you know, I haven't done a lot of the things I maybe could have done. Because being "content" is more important to me than actually being _happy_, because being actually _happy_ by pursuing my dreams, that feels like a fuckin' losing game right there. Because I only get that if people are, like, actually decent to me. Which isn't something I have a lot of experience with.
And I guess I could be mad at this guy, you know, for not being decent to me, to the people around him, but he wasn't the first and he wasn't the last. The world is fuckin' filled witih people like him. It's people like him who run this fuckin' world, who determine what the rest of us _can_ achieve, and the only way to change that is if people can work together against them, and they fuckin' _know_ that, and if they work at anything, at any goddamn thing at all, it's making sure that we never, ever work together. So I don't blame us for _not_ working together. Because it's hard enough without the assholes who rule the world actively working to keep us apart. We're doing the best we can, and if we're not able to make a just world with that, well, _we're_ not the ones to blame for that.
But I'm not irrationally angry at _him_ for that. Don't hate the player, hate the game, right? But I do hate him, because of _how_ he played the game. Here's what I hate him for.
We had, like... we had this kind of enforced recreation thing. This thing to build "morale". Wasn't his idea. Was the idea of the director of marketing. Who had her own problems, but I mean... as shitty as the idea of "morale" and "team-building" is, as shitty as it is for the business owner to talk about us being a "family" and then... I mean, from my perspective, he wasn't wrong, because I came from a shitty, abusive family, and he as the, I guess, patriarch certainly lived up to that standard. I do resent him for talking about the company as a "family". I actually am irrationally angry about that, about people who talk about "family businesses" when what they mean is corporate-run dynasties, like, sure, Standard Oil was a "family business", and that's supposed to be a good thing, a good thing that they weren't accountable to anybody but themselves because _family values_. That makes me rationally angry, the idea that "values" were something that was determined by these evil, abusive motherfuckers, whereas my actual values were and are condemned as evil, wicked, perverse. But that's changed some, at least, during my lifetime. There are people out there who think of me as good and virtuous and them as wicked and evil. I mean. I don't think of myself as "good" or "virtuous", I don't buy into that manichean worldview, but I guess if one of us has to be "good" I'm probably more deserving of the label than this guy. So I'm not gonna argue with it too hard.
Anyway I am irrationally angry at him, at anyone, who valorizes "family values", on like a personal level. I'm madder at him, though, for this enforced recreation thing. Because I did work hard for people to have some fun. The marketing director was all, hey, you like music, you know all kinds of interesting facts, you should put together a quiz! About music! And I was like, yeah, that does seem fun. But the thing is, like... I mean, I'm autistic as fuck, and in the past, I mean, I would have taken that opportunity to show off how smart I was. Because I didn't necessarily have the social skills to realize that, you know, hey, this isn't about showing off how smart I am, this is about giving other people a chance to have a good time. And looking at things from that attitude meant that I actually had a really good time putting together that quiz. I worked hard at it, but I also really enjoyed the process.
The thing was you have a workplace and it was a fairly diverse workplace, people from all kinds of different backgrounds, ages, races, etc., and people with different backgrounds have different experiences with music, different music they know about. I got a fairly diverse taste in music compared to most people, though probably not compared to your average ILX poster, but not enough to speak to all of the different experiences of all the different people there. For me that was a good thing, though, it gave me an opportunity to learn about music that I didn't know much about. These questions were nearly all superficial questions, there were, like, one or two stumpers in there but mostly they were superficial questions. Breadth, not depth. The goal was for each person, no matter what they knew about music, no matter what they _thought_ they knew about music, to have one question where they were like "Oh! I know that!" And even better, to have that be a question that's not like, "Oh well everybody knows that". To really... This was one of my strongest values at the time, _everybody knows something that most other people don't_, everybody has _value_, everybody has something to _contribute_ even though most people are taught to believe they're inferior.
And this, I think, this I think is what gets to the heart of what makes me mad about this guy. Because there's this prize, this kind of meaningless prize attached. No real value at all. Bragging rights, basically. Since there was no real value to the prize, I figure, you know, no point in googleproofing them. Because this is a quiz for fun. It's not a quiz for someone to show off how smart they are. And everybody else in the company, a couple dozen people, they took the quiz that way, they had fun, they were like "Oh! I know this!", and the quiz didn't, you know, make them feel stupid for not knowing the stuff that the people who are rich and powerful in this world act like are the Only Important Things.
But this motherfucker. This dumb motherfucker. He goes and GOOGLES THE FUCKING ANSWERS so he can win the contest and get a prize of, like, no value. I look at him doing that and I'm like, what the fuck. You're supposed to be the leader? Everybody else is smart enough to realize hey, this is something for fun, let's have fun with it, and this guy, this guy alone, he has to look like he's the Smartest Guy in the Room, that he knows more than everybody else. And people do actually buy into that bullshit. That's the sad bit. People look at that and think guys like that are "alpha males" or like "Oh well that's why he's CEO", and yeah, that is why he's CEO, he's CEO because with all the stuff he has in his favor, he has to cheat just so he can win at a meaningless fucking quiz that was _designed for him to not win at_.
Yeah fuck that guy. I worked to create something other people could enjoy, and other people _did_ enjoy it, and he goes out there and tries to ruin it for everyone else, because his fragile fucking cishet white male ego is more important than anybody and anything else. That fucking asshole. Of all the heinous and reprehensible things about him, _that_, _that_ is the thing I will hate him until my dying day for.
Anyway. Gonna try to go back to sleep now. I think... I think being angry is important for me. I think getting out this irrational anger in this way was good.
― Kate (rushomancy), Thursday, 4 April 2024 09:26 (three weeks ago) link