Wednesday, January 27, 2010

Remembering old psychotic coworkers

When I worked at Consumers Distributing one summer in the late 80's, I had one co worker who was particularly psychotic. The first thing he asked me when I met him was if I could punch him in the arm as hard as I could. Then he told me, he'd punch me in the arm as hard as he could. Gee. Sounds like fun. I seem to recall this game. I played it in grade 4 when I was nine. I was now 19 and this guy was 26.
"No thanks." I told him. I'm wary of deals like this with people I've just met. He may as well have hit me up for a loan(in fact, he did that later).

This guy drove a motorcycle and picked up hitch hikers. I asked him if he thought this was dangerous and he said "Not for me!" explaining that he'd smash his bike into a tree if a hitchhiker tried to rob him. I had other thoughts of him digging large holes in the woods after and wondered where he kept his shovel.

He also said he was discharged from the army and could kill me using only his thumbs. Contests of strength were always very important to him and he expected everyone to match his extraordinary feats of strength! Case in point, the time I asked him to help me get a medium sized fridge off the top of one of the warehouse shelves (he's probably the guy who put them up there. Why put the the heaviest crap we have 15 feet off the ground?). He called me some name that was meant to point out what a weakling I was for even thinking I'd need help to lift something that weighed more than I did, but he came along to show me how a real man did it. This may be funny, I thought. He waved me off, climbed to the top of the warehouse shelving and pushed the fridge off the top. I stepped out of the way as this thing came down and it landed with a crash! One of the corners of the box was accordianed and I could see the siding poking out.
"there ya go wimp!" he said and he went off to cause havoc elsewhere.

I sighed and said thanks and wheeled it to the front Passing by my manager to tell him that GI Joe has gotten it off the top shelf, not me and that I'd be very suprised if it worked.

One good thing about working in an office, it seems to cut down on co-workers like this. There's other kinds of difficult people, but they're much easier to deal with

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