I was enjoying a cup of coffee on my back porch. We live on the tenth hole green on a golf course. It is set in nature, nestled by trees and filled with deer and turkeys and all sorts of other things like that. It is a very Keep Tahoe Blue kind of place in the Sierra foothills.
So this entitled prick of a man in his seventies cruises to the green on his golf cart and proceeds to jump out of the cart with a lit cigarette in his mouth that he just throws on the ground still lit before putting his ball. I was kind enough to wait for his shot, but then he walked back to the cart.
I asked him if he was going to pick up his cigarette. He rolled his old man eyes at me and I looked at his friends and said, really? You’re going to let this guy throw his nasty cigarette butt? It’s not his personal golf course. They just weakly shrugged their shoulders and they all drove away.
I put down my coffee and walked out front to my driveway, off to the side out of view. The next tee is directly across the street from my driveway. So as soon as the old man put his ball on the tee and takes his driver back, I immediately yell, “Fore, you effing litterbug,” at the top of my lungs and completely ruined his shot.
The ball literally bounced off his own golf cart and he practically threw his driver. It brought me immense amounts of joy. Thankfully, he had the foresight not to retaliate and they all drove off down the fairway.
Years ago, I worked in a semi-public sector job as part of a successful team helping make life easy for local businesses. Our team boss took a good job in the private sector and a new boss was recruited from a decent organization similar to ours in a different part of the country. She worked compressed hours Monday to Thursday and was off on Fridays.
A month or two in and although the new boss was quite particular about things being done her way and had upset a couple of my colleagues by criticizing their work, I’d had no problems with her. We had a team meeting where the boss said that our performance was not good enough. By the way, we were arguably the best in the country and that she wanted to be more involved in what and how we did everything to ensure better quality, so we should just copy her to every client email so she could comment as needed before we sent another reply.
Although this seemed inefficient, nobody argued and I just asked her if I should wait until Monday for her to comment on any client emails received on a Friday. I cannot remember exactly what she said, but at the end of the meeting, she asked me to stay behind and then told me in a heated tone that my question was bullying behavior, that it was unprofessional to ask the question in front of the team and said that my actions were the sort of thing that HR would see as grounds for dismissal and that I should be very careful in the future.