Today was my company's final day in our office. Movers will be relocating all our stuff to a new headquarters for our first day in the new office on Monday. Moving is exciting and frustrating at the same time, but I'm looking forward to this for a number of reasons. There's something inspiring about moving into a newly-renovated modern office, particularly when it's happening so close to the start of a new year. More importantly, this also signifies the start of a new role in a new department for one of my colleagues who has been an absolute fucker for the three years I've been at my job.
I, technically, was supposed to be his supervisor, but he never saw it that way. This is partly due to the fact that the head of our department allowed this to happen, but blame really can't go much further than this one guy -- my colleague -- who is just a despicable person. He's very talented, and I'll never deny him that, which is what made it so much harder to get anyone to notice the fact that he was a major cancer to not only me, but everyone in my department. He has an ego the size of Manhattan, will take credit and brag when he does a good job, but try to distance himself (or even blame others) from any mistakes or inefficiencies. He talks about other coworkers behind their back, then acts acts like they're best friends when they're around. Any time you try to tell him something you just learned, his response is always, "oh, yeah, I knew about that already." This is just a short list of why he a terrible person to rely on in a small team environment. Ah, corporate America!
I can work with difficult people. In fact, when someone in my department has a hard time dealing with an outside consultant, I'm usually the one who is asked to take over the short-term management of that person. Beyond what I've already mentioned, though, is my complete and utter distaste for him as a human being. Here's a guy who makes inappropriate comments at work, who is constantly talking about the shit he's going to buy, and name drops all of his friends in high places: the "buddy of mine" at Apple, the friend who is a professional fine artist ("You know, he does okay. He sells his paintings for a couple grand."), and the many close friends who own highly successful bars and restaurants (but, in reality, he may have only met once through a mutual acquaintance). Coming from a lower middle class family, one with a long history of military service, blue collar work, and being the first on one side of my family to graduate from college, I despise how he claims his family "didn't have much", yet I know they lived in a very wealthy part of town. Fake as fuck.
Most of you have stopped reading at this point because I'm starting to rant. I'll wrap by saying that I'm very thankful for the opportunity to start anew in our new office in 2015, and rebuild my team with hard-working, collaborative people ... because shitty people make everything more difficult.
