Bullies and Your Career
One of the guards was always incredibly bored and was therefore always looking to get into long conversations. My job kept me pretty busy, but one day I decided to sit down and start chatting with him. I was glad I did because it turned out to be one of the most interesting conversations I had ever had. The guard told me he had spent the last 10 years of his career sitting in police cars outside the homes of a few kids in the neighborhood where I grew up. These homes were within a few streets of my house. The retired officer told me that he and various policemen had been doing 24-hour surveillance of a few of these homes for “at least a decade, just watching who came and went”. “A couple of your neighbors were among the most powerful crime bosses in the country,” he told me. “They were being watched all the time.” The neighborhood in which I grew up consisted of quiet urban streets. Since the courthouse I was working in was around 100 miles from there, it was a real coincidence to find myself talking to someone who had spent 10 years sitting in a police car right down the street from my house. I certainly never saw these police cars or the policeman doing stakeouts down the street when I was growing up, and I never heard anything about it from anyone. The people that the guard mentioned, with whom I had gone to school, all had Italian last names, and their parents had been rumored to be in the mafia. When I asked the retired policeman what the parents did to warrant such massive police attention, he said something I will never forget: “Lots of stuff. But like most people who succeed over a long period of time, they were experts in bullying and intimidating people, and getting them to do what they wanted them to do. They are just grown up bullies who are really mean-spirited.” This former policeman essentially saw the world in terms of bullies and the bullied. In fact, everything about the way the guy saw the world was in terms of people intimidating others, and people being intimidated by others. He was very short, and in listening to him speak I started to feel that he himself had had probably been bullied when he was younger, perhaps because of his stature. The guard’s statement really stuck with me because at the time I was working in a courthouse, seeing all sorts of conflicts every day. I was seeing cases of companies being sued and suing people. I was seeing all sorts of cases of bank robberies and other crimes. However, when I looked at most of the cases I was dealing with, I realized that most of the conflict always had a bully on one side of the conflict. In fact, when it comes right down to it, most conflicts involve bullies in some way. Over the next several months I started looking at every case I worked on in a different light.
- I saw a case of a man who found a bum on the street and talked him into robbing a bank for him by intimidating him.
- I saw a case of a woman hurt in a giant convenience chain, in which the chain was “lawyering up” and intimidating her by dragging up her past, threatening her with malicious prosecution and questioning her motives.
- I saw a case of a company copying a very small competitor’s product and then making it incredibly difficult for the small company to sue, by making the legal process extraordinarily cumbersome and expensive for them.
- I saw a case of the government bullying someone that it did not like by taking away their property and making things difficult for them.
