Member-only story
How To Pass Judgment Without Being A Jerk
The importance of backstory
As a young twenty-something, I worked as a front desk clerk at a famous hotel. On my first day, one of my coworkers nearly made me cry after I made a minor mistake. His bark was so intense that drops of saliva flew from his mouth onto my face as he spoke. I hadn’t expected such vitriol from this lowly clerk — a sixty-ish-year-old guy who sat in the back office answering phones.
As the weeks passed, I’d come up with creative excuses to avoid engaging with him. I learned to anticipate his outbursts by how his tone changed when he spoke on the phone. At the right moment, I’d excuse myself to attend to a customer request.
An explanation of his behavior emerged a few weeks later. A coworker let slip that this guy once managed a department but had been demoted several times until they couldn’t demote him any lower.
Perhaps it was age discrimination. Sure, I’d be angry too, but if I had been demoted several times, pushed into a position well below my qualifications, I’d quit rather than suffer the humiliation. With a pension to tide me over, I’d use my precious time for something other than torturing everyone else.
Despite his assholery, some of my veteran coworkers treated him with reverence. This dynamic puzzled me, so I poked…
