Super rich guy tried to pick up my then girlfriend at an industry event after party kind of thing. She was not impressed by any of his shit. The look of disappointment on his face after showing off his $250k watch still makes me smile all these years later.
Is anyone into watches at the age when rich men try to pick them up? I could be easily impressed by a watch now (a personalised G-Shock $50-300, any diapason $500-2k, an enthusiastic watch geek explaining their Jaeger-Lecoultre…), but not part of the target demographic.
The Titan submersible incident comes to mind. ESPECIALLY after viewing the released coastguard hearings.
That submarine imploding near the Titanic will never be not funny. Especially since the guy who designed it believed in the “move fast and break things” nonsense.
Every person on board paid a pretty penny to be on that sub, so no pity from me either (except perhaps for the teenager who was reportedly terrified to go on, but did it to please his rich prick father).
Some prick in a Porsche demanded that he get to pick his own spot in the valet lot where I work. The valet guy just grinning and shaking his head while the rich dude had a meltdown was some good schadenfreude. Then i got the spot he wanted because the valet guy was my homie.
I’m a union organizer, so I got to see some truly golden moments. My favorite was during a campaign, we took over a Q&A session with a member of the C-suite present. In a previous meeting he tried to convince me of some bs, so I asked him directly “why did you lie to me?” during this take over. The look on his face was priceless, and it took him over a minute to respond pathetically with “I don’t appreciate being called a liar”
Can you tell us any more about the lie and the rest of the response? Sounds juicy
Yea for sure! We were organizing around performance metrics, quotas, discipline, etc for quite a while. My work is in QA, where quotas are actually really bad for software development. We had been trying to get management to research and implement modern QA practices that would reduce/eliminate quotas, without much success. We also wanted progressive discipline with real guidance, because if you don’t meet metrics then the performance improvement plan (pip) was really just a do-or-die meet the metrics for 10 days or get fired.
In the previous meeting, it wasn’t a take over but coworkers and I relentlessly asked about pips, metrics, etc. We were very clearly getting under their skin, to the point where he asked me how I felt pips should work. He was probably thinking I never planned that far ahead and would discredit myself, but I had done significant research on modern QA management techniques and gave an overview of my minimum for a 3 step pip. Right before he ended the meeting, he essentially “confirmed” that we do it exactly like that, no sword of Damocles or anything.
Of course having done the legwork to actually talk to employees that had gone through the process, we knew that it was total horseshit. Just to be sure, we talked to a few more people to confirm that pips were still being used to cut people for cause instead of improving their metrics before planning the takeover. To open the meeting, I asked this to the COO:
I’d like to preface my question by saying thank you for hosting these sessions again, and preemptively note that a lot of us are here to discuss PIPs. In the last Q&A session I attended, I was told by you that PIPs follow a progressive discipline model. However, we’re aware that most if not all employees that fail a PIP are terminated immediately, and multiple employees have been fired shortly after passing a PIP for failing to meet productivity expectations. Why did you lie to me?
His face went beet red and you could see the anger build in his eyes. After about a minute, he responds with “I don’t appreciate being called a liar. You’re hostility isn’t welcome and I reject the question”. After that, you could cut the tension with a knife. I reiterated my question that pips don’t work the way he said they do, but he continued to refuse it until I moved on to the many other “hostile” questions I had.
For the aftermath, he lied to us again in that meeting when someone uninvolved with the take over asked about remote work, and said there’s no plans to change anything for the foreseeable future, before RTO was announced a week later. There was another meeting about RTO with him that I attended, and he made a vague threat about “respectability” and ending the meeting if he felt disrespected after looking at the attendees. I wanted to ask a legit question over mic, and he ignored me until it was becoming obvious to others in the meeting. He stopped doing all q&a stuff after this for some reason.
