Sunday, June 03, 2007

Sturgis General

A guy I used to work with grew up in South Dakota. His parents, when they were alive, still lived there. He married a girl from Falcon, who was a school teacher. He was a school teacher too until he became a drug rep and worked for Miles. He used to go to the big Harley shindig at Sturgis as often as he could.
To my knowledge, this guy had never owned a Harley, indeed had never been on a motorcycle.
He is the kind of guy who dips skoal when his wife is not around and spits it in a styrofoam cup. In my opinion, the only good thing to put in a styrofoam cup is beer. This guy is corporate America 360 days of the year, then for five days he gets to play Harley outlaw. When we worked together, at first, we got along great. Then I noticed he was spending more and more time with the big boss and dropping, in our phone conversations, references to conversations with the big boss, such as,
"when the big boss and I were playing golf on Tuesday..." Shucks, I was working on Tuesday doing my job, I didn't have time to be running to the head office playing golf, I was doing my job.
Then I noticed that when a tough situation came up, he would pass it off to the legal department right off the bat, instead of trying to solve it himself, as we were supposed to do.
His favorite word to describe a female co-worker was a word that I never used. This guy was the master of the art of office politics. And I never got the hint. He has turned into a petty tyrant over the people in his section. He forgot where he came from, or maybe he didn't.

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