And Are You Going To Tell Me?

 

I have the immeasurable bad luck of working with a gentleman who has the personality of a wounded predator. He flounced into my life directly from the land of perfection wherein he learned everything there is to know about everything not least of which is the best and quickest way to come across as offputtingly rude and arrogant. My being placed in a semi-supervisory role over him immediately offended him and placed me squarely in his sights. Knowing everything about everything is such a crushing burden to live under one suspects he has simply forgotten how to walk amongst mortals.

Perhaps the worst part, if it is even possible to isolate such a thing in an individual with innumerable character flaws, is the way he attempts to mask his snide condescension in a saccharine and insincere giggle. One has always found people that laugh at their own observations grating, but when it’s used to camouflage assertions of one’s own superiority it crosses the line of insufferable and lands square into the land of ass-hat.

Ass-hat is how I’ve come to refer to self-anointed perfect one. I made every attempt to be civil, to look past the abrasive personality, the put-downs, the non-to-casual recitation of his attributes and accomplishments (each one eclipsing my own in the most delphic of ways), but when he started to repeatedly wrestle with his ‘space issues’ by kicking a co-worker under the conference table, a co-worker who happens to be recovering from hip surgery I knew I was dealing with a human being that deserves no consideration or gentle handling on my part.

You could lasso the nearest star into our office and it would not warm the chill I’ve brought into the office this morning. I have quite actually had more than enough of ass-hat’s bullshit, and that fact is lost on no one, including himself. I can be the sweetest, warmest, the most well-mannered and gentle creature you have ever come across if you treat me right, but if you push it, over and over and over again, then I become something no rational human being even wants to walk the same Earth with. And I am here. Reading emails. Doing my shit.