Only My “Friends” Hate Me.
It recently occurred to me that ever since I banned comments from my ex-company, I haven’t gotten any rude anonymous comments or hate mail. I was literally getting hate mail and comments related to almost every post I wrote, and it’s just stopped. I banned comments from them after one of them decided it would be awesome to post the name of my current employer, as if I OR my employer wants that information released.
I was fine with people being rude, obnoxious, hateful, accusing me of “dishing it out but not taking it,” accusing me of being self-absorbed or “pathetic, taking stuff personally that had nothing to do with them, etc. Whatever. If you think my writing a blog is “pathetic” or that I’m an ass, you’re entitled to your incorrect opinion. Frankly, if you’re leaving anonymous rude remarks ON my blog, I’d argue that you are the pot calling the kettle black.
Notably, when I cut off their access to my comments, the number of hits coming from there dropped from about 75 per day to less than 5 a week. I think that proves my long-held belief that most if not all of the trolls on my site were people I knew who were too chicken to talk to my face. At the peak of it’s popularity, Incredipete was getting somewhere in the neighborhood of 10,000 hits a day. Now, that’s dropped to about 4,000. It jumps up to 5 or 6,000 when I start posting regularly, but I doubt it will ever get back to 10k. A lot of that has to do with the drop in trolls, I would imagine. I don’t need that kind of attention. If you can’t say something nice (or at least intelligent), then shut the eff up or start your own blog.
In a way, it’s a bit sad. I was far from perfect at that job. There was a person or two that I never got along with, and I fueled those flames because I’m a pretty truculent person. Personalities are bound to clash sometimes… it’s not personal, it’s just life. However, looking back, I can honestly say that I never screwed anyone over at that place. I always tried to do right by people. There were people that were CERTAIN I had screwed them over, but they were just plain wrong. Often, I knew who had screwed them over but wasn’t at liberty to divulge. I knew I was taking the hit, and sometimes that’s just what you do if you’re gonna be a “company man.” Some people would say that merely letting myself be a “company man” proves that I’m an ass. (And those people will never make more than 12 bucks an hour.)
Still, it’s astonishing to me that the people who gave me the hardest time were people who I never directly worked with or supervised. I assume they hated me because I was promoted at a young age, or because I was male, or because I was bald, or because I was a “suck up” (by which they mean I worked harder than they were willing to so management liked me)… I have no idea. I don’t even want to know what their problem with me was, because they literally had no right to have a problem at all. So many times since I started writing, I’ve fought the urge to name names and vent - just get it all out there in the open to “prove I was right” or whatever.
But that’s the immature thing to do, so I’ve never given in to my desire to post an expose’. And I won’t, so if any of you are still reading, you have nothing to worry about. Perhaps as I’ve gotten older, and gotten out of that weird science experiment/fishbowl/gossip factory that my last company was, I’ve become less cynical. I’ve certainly stopped feeling like I need to be defensive. I am who I am, I’m doing the best I can, and I’m not hurting anyone. Maybe that combination of things has led those people to stop tripping about everything I have to say here.
When I was there, I was running my departments with future plans for them in mind. When I left, though, I had no control over what happened. Departmental decisions became someone else’s to make. I learned after the fact that I was blamed for several decisions that were made AFTER I left, as if I had some influence over them. I’m not going to even say whether or not I agree with those decisions. It’s just sad that I would be blamed for things I had nothing to do with. When I left, I even went to bat for my employees with a high-level executive about the problems I saw. None of them got to see that… they just saw that when I left, the things I’d said I wanted didn’t come to fruition.
When people found this blog, they realized they could try to screw me over without me knowing who was doing it. I could go on and on about the ideas I had that were stolen and claimed by other people. I could tell you about all of the things I accomplished for the company while certain people were SURE I was sitting on my thumbs doing nothing. I could tell you how people would lie straight to my face and then tell my boss the exact opposite, making me look like an idiot. I could tell you how bad I always felt disciplining people on policies that I didn’t agree with. But none of that matters, and people will believe whatever they want to believe.
I’m just happy to know that it’s not the entire world that hates me…. just the people who used to claim they were my friends. I can live with that.
Pete
Thursday, March 27th, 2008
