Egomaniacal people....

I read a blog...the name of which I will not divulge (since I'm going to be critical of it and the guy whom I'm referring to is so psycho he might sue me for character defamation if I mentioned his name!).

Anyway, the guy is a former actor who still lives in Hollywood, and is successful in a new career. Unlike probably everyone else on his street, he works at home.

So, today he blogs that construction people came in yesterday and demolished the house next to his. And now they're going to start constructing a new house on that lot.

And this guy is just soooooooo upset about this! How dare they demolish that house and cause his own house to shake so badly! And when they start building the new house there's going to be the noise of ....whatever construction noises this guy expects...and he's so angry at the inconsiderateness of the people having this done, and when they finally move into the house, he is going to go over and visit them and tell them how inconsiderate they were to have this new house built!

And I'm thinking to myself while I'm reading this... do you have any idea how childish and vindictive you sound? Do you realize that these construction people, not to mention the people having the house built, probably assume that all their neighbors work and so won't be in their houses to be "annoyed" by all the noise and vibration.

But he works at home, so it's annoying him, so they have no right to be doing it! And he seems to have every intention of calling up the construction people every day and whining about the noise, and when the new folks move in, he's going to apparently rip them a new one, because they're "rich, entitled snobs" who dared have a new house built!

There are more than a few people like this, unfortunately. And no matter how you try to make it clear to them that they're being childish, they just don't get it.

Several months ago I used to work for a new loss mitigation company, and I blogged about it occasionally, because the boss was such a jerk. Initially, we had got along well. He hired me as a copywriter, for $1,000 a month. And he put me on the mailing list for all the emails he sent. (I still don't know why he did it...but he did it.)

So, the company has started, and someone writes in complaining that they sent in all their paperwork and nothing happened, and they were going to sue,etc. And my boss sends them a very nasty letter, saying "Okay, we're terminating your contract, and we've got lawyers" and this and that.

And I, thinking we had this good rapport, emailed him and told him that that was a very bad tone to take with people. He was dealing with people under tremendous stress, and for them to receive a letter like the one he sent, couched in such vicious and contemptous phrases, might send someone off the deep end, and it's be him or his company that they'd come after.

Well, he didn't appreciate this advice. I guess he thought a $1,000 a month copywriter had no business telling a $100,000 a month CEO how to run his business. (Never mind the fact that in the past I'd been secretary to quite a few CEOs, and I knew professional behavior when I saw it, and when I didn't see it.)

After that he was barely civil to me, and eventually I quit. Before I did so, however, I could see that the business was riding for a fall, as I was cc-ed on all sorts of commicaes from people trying to find *other* people who'd worked on so-and-so's loan modification. (Indeed, I wonder if this idiot CEO had everyone in the whole company cc-ed on these emails that should have been private between individuals.) But if what I suspect is correct, everyone working there must have known since day one how incompetently it was run...yet they continued to work there.

Anyway, that loss mitigation company has been put out of business today, and is being sued by the state for failing to pay taxes on wages, etc. It had hundreds of complaints from clients who never got any service, and dozens of employees (who worked in the call center getting contracts from poor schmucks) are filing lawsuits because they hadn't been paid.

And I'm just laughing. Back when we'd been on good terms, the CEO had told me he was opening up his business in an effort to "cock a snook" at his former business partners who had eased him out of their partnership because they didn't think his business model was any good. And he was going to show them!

And, gee, that business model worked out pretty well, didn't it?

Meantime, hundreds of desperate people who thought this company was going to help them save their homes have lost the money they paid to this company in advance, and they've lost their homes, and for that, I hope this CEO goes to jail. At the very least, I hope he's held up to ridicule and never gets to run another business in his life. (Unfortunately, CEOs are like politicians. They run one business into the ground, and prove their incompetence, but there's always some friend to come along and say, sure, we'll give you this high paying position. See what you can do here.)

But frankly, I think this guy is criminally liable, or at the very least criminally negligent, and responsible for a lot of people lsoing their houses, and I hope he goes to jail!