Ask Lemmy

I guess I could tell a story about the worst person I ever met. I don't know exactly what criteria elevate someone to the level of "evil" versus just being an awful, horrid person, so I'll let readers make that judgement.

It was 2010. I was 20 years old and needed a job. Through family networking, I was able to land a brief stint working with a distant cousin of mine who I'd never met before. Let's call him "James". I'm scheduled to work with him for about a week, traveling out of state to a small town in Virginia to do some maintenance on pools and such. Seems like a simple enough gig.

He pulls up to my house in his pickup truck to pick me up. Keep in mind I've never met this guy before in my life. We're not 10 minutes down the road when he starts dropping every racial slur you can think of talking about Obama and minorities and such. Guy was like a thesaurus of epithets.

Fast forward 5 or 6 hours that we've been driving. During this brief window of time I have heard this guy scream at his girlfriend over the phone about how she "better not be at the bar" or "hanging out with her friends". He has road raged at every inconsequential inconvenience, making multiple reckless, dangerous maneuvers to save virtually zero transit time. He has pinned every misfortune in his life on black people, immigrants, gays. Anyone but himself.

After this harrowing trip, we're finally at our destination and we can get to work. To say this guy was an abusive boss would not do it justice. His preferred method of communication was yelling. He'd light up a joint and smoke it very brazenly when there were children not particularly far away from us (one of the pools we worked on was at a community center where lots of kids would play). I don't have any problem with weed, but c'mon.

Each day when we were done with work, we'd pick out some place to eat. During this week-long stay in this small town, I witnessed multiple random acts of kindness by strangers. James had nothing but angry, hateful things to say about every single one. I saw a guy let some veterans cut in front of him in line at a Bojangles. "What a kiss-ass," James says. One day at a KFC, an elderly woman gives me and James a big bucket of chicken and biscuits because they got her order wrong and told her to keep it. "Old bitch," says James after she walks away.

Every night after dinner he'd be at the bar getting hammered. Picking fights with other patrons and generally being a miserable pile of shit. One evening James gets up from the bar to go take a piss. A big biker guy James has been fucking with comes up to me and says, "Your friend's got a big mouth."

"Not my friend," I reply. "He's my boss, unfortunately. But if you and your biker buddies wanna drag him out back and beat the piss out of him, you ain't gonna hear me complain." Biker guy gives a big laugh and pats me on the back in an understanding way.

On the last day of the job, we've begun the drive back home. He sees a hotel with a pool that we're about to pass and unilaterally decides we're gonna try to fleece some hotel owner by doing some "maintenance" on the pool. He convinces this old man that the pool needs inspecting and the guy agrees to purchase our services. James fucks around for an hour doing virtually nothing to this pool and then charges the guy several hundred dollars. Brow beating and bullying him the entire time.

And to wrap it all up, he didn't pay me what we'd negotiated. Unfortunately I wasn't good at advocating for myself at this time in my life, so I just put up with it.

The silver lining to all this is I haven't seen or heard from him since then. He drove away and has never darkened my doorway in the 15 years since that dismal week. Good riddance.