I’ll Be Your Huckleberry…
What working with sociopaths, brawlers and trust fund revolutionaries taught me about conflict resolution
On his last day with the company, “Matteo” took a pull off his beer and said, “I think people should only be allowed to have one child.”
“Well then,” I thought. “Here we go…”
Matteo had given me a “vibe” long before that, and truth be told, I was quite happy to see him go. He was angry even back then, although at the time he was at least civil. I’m not sure of the timeline, but I think it was before he had gotten the boot from a popular blog he’d helped to found, but before certain parties professionally tagged him with accusations of assault, violence, and maybe even stalking.
We were still in our first “office” back then. It was really just a spare storage room in the warehouse of a woodworkers’ collective. It was customary at that time to crack a six-pack after a hard day of moving jobs, throw ideas up on the whiteboard I still have right behind me, and figure out the systems that would allow us to scale up and grow. (While it was laughable even then, it felt like a Silicon Valley startup to me, at least). In many ways it was the best time of the company, even though gross revenue was somewhere around the $200k mark, which believe me, isn’t much for a moving company.
Matteo was quitting so he could go back to his sports blog for a bit. As I said, I was glad to see him go, and since he was leaving, I figured indulging in a little political discussion was fine.
“So,” I ventured, “Do you think the State should be empowered to forcibly abort or sterilize citizens?”
I still remember being chilled at his response. He shrugged. “Sure,” he said. “Why not?” It wasn’t that he had arrived to the conclusion through reasoned consideration of public policy. He just didn’t care. He seemed totally unconcerned about the implications of living under a State powerful enough to allow or take life at will. He was one of the most educated employees I ever had. He just shrugged.
Thank God this is his last day…
The thing is, it wasn’t his last day, though. Several months later, as we found ourselves short of drivers, my Ops Manager called him for an emergency Saturday job. He obliged to help, and then he stayed on. And as time rolled on, he became increasingly bitter and temperamental. With increasing frequency, I’d get complaints from guys working with him that he’d rant on the job about everything under the sun - his waning career as a journalist, capitalism, and, of course, me.
I tried to talk to him a few times. Back then, (and, to be honest, right up until the last day of MTB), I had this naive idea that communication and openness were good things to foster in the business. One time, in the last year of the company, I reached out to him via text. “Hey man - I hear that you have some complaints. What’s up?”
He. Lit. Me. Up. In several dozen texts he attacked me, my management style, and accused me of illegal practices. He said he reported me to the Labor Department for various things, although I never heard from them. Via the written word, Matteo was bold and vicious. In person, he was a coward.
Well, there was this one time…
I’d visited his crew on a job site. It was a brutal one - a mentally unstable woman who hadn’t packed a thing as moving out of a place with a really, really long walk to the truck. It was one of those Virginia summer days where you could drink a gallon of water and never have to go to the bathroom. Walking out of an air conditioned apartment building into the summer heat was like being grabbed and squeezed in a giant, sweaty, wool-gloved fist.
I helped out a bit on the job, and at one point we were organizing the customer’s items to be packed in the back of the truck. (By the way, one of the other guys on that job later threatened to blow up our fleet with gas tank IEDs.) Matteo walked behind me on the small sidewalk and stumbled, sending his shoulder into my back right between the shoulder blades. “Been walking long?” I laughed, (yuk! yuk! yuk!) and went back to prepping some items for loading.
It wasn’t until I was driving back too the office an hour later that several pieces fell into place and I realized that he hadn’t stumbled and fell - that passive-aggressive S.O.B. had intentionally shoved me.
I was, and probably still am, that slow.
Here’s the point: I should have cut him loose, permanently, years before. Instead, I affably tried to find reason and common ground with someone who is in all likelihood beyond civil society. To this day he’s still lighting me up on Twitter as an example of the unscrupulous nature of small business owners and capitalism.
That was just one example of many. Here’s another one:
“Bob” had been a sous-chef, allegedly. He was another one of the menagerie of misfits that came through MTB - like so many before and after him, (including me), he’d fallen out of the respectable employment world and had to make ends meet by lifting heavy objects for pennies. My many failings were becoming apparent to me, and I think I was trying to make amends by consciously and intentionally extending grace to those who had likewise screwed up their lives in various ways. Maybe it was patronizing, but sometimes it made a connection. Other times - most times, actually - it just signaled weakness.
That’s what happened with Bob. I gave him a pep talk when he walked all over a wealthy client’s white carpet with muddy feet because, as this this grown man told me, “It was the only thing he could do.” When the first accusation of drinking on the job came in from a customer, I let it slide because I had no evidence, and I did not want to get anywhere near an accusation of racism. When the second incident came in, and he refused to be breathalyzed, and I could smell it on him, I had no choice.
I believe he would have killed me if there hadn’t been witnesses. He said as much as he crazily stomped around the warehouse throwing chairs. “I’m going to jail!” he said as he vectored over to me. He and I squared off and stood face-to-face, him a good six inches taller than me, breathing through his nostrils, for at least a full, silent minute.
I had two thoughts in that interminable minute:
1. My gun was in my bag 20 feet away. I could probably get to it, but would I use it? No. At least not against an unarmed man, even if he outweighed me by 75 pounds, at least.
2. Crazily, I thought of a passage from Keats, as a liberal-arts weenie will do in such situations. “Though a quarrel in the streets is a thing to be hated, the energies displayed in it are fine…”
I said a quick Act of Contrition and a prayer for my children. Really. I was positive he was going to punch my ticket right then and there.
Fortunately, another employee gently took Bob by the shoulders and walked him out the door. I heard him say, “It’s not worth it, brother…It’s not worth it…”
(I should note that I ran into Bob at the bank about a year later. He was still struggling, as were we. He apologized and, as was the custom for ex-employees, asked for his job back. By that point, I’d wised up a bit and declined, knowing that 99 percent of the time past behavior was an excellent indicator of future behavior. We shook hands and parted ways amicably).
A final example just to round out the Rule of Threes: “Timothy” was a hotheaded trust fund kid. His father was a lawyer and is mother was a doctor. He was on track to go to law school himself. Despite coming from the healthiest, most intact family of all of us, for him, every single disagreement had roots in colonialism and slavery. More than that, he told a co-worker who had a mixed-race child that that was wrong, and he shouldn’t be mixing with white people. Timothy would never let his pure black child associate with mixed-race children.
You can imagine how awkward it was for this white-boy employer to have that conversation. “So, ah, [young black man], this shouldn’t be a workplace conversation, but I wonder if you’ve heard of the Civil Rights movement…”
He was not moved by my appeal to a race-neutral utopia where we all live and work in brotherhood. No, he was instead inspired to try to rally all of the black guys on the crew to reject honky oppression. Fortunately, all of his would-be revolutionary comrades decided that they couldn’t eat ideology, and we managed to get along and do our jobs for awhile longer.
Once again, I didn’t fire him when I should have. He later quit by refusing to show up on a Saturday. He knew full well how destructive that was to the reputation and good order of the company - in fact, that’s why he did it the way he did.
These are just snapshots illustrating something I have a really hard time with, but something I need to get a handle on: cutting out the BS. And that means removing people from my life who accuse, demand, and criticize. Building things, whether they’re families, businesses, communities or countries, requires us to make clear decisions based on unambiguous distinctions. The default position in life is going with the flow, which also happens to be the most assured way to go over the waterfall.
Here’s the lesson for myself, and anyone who has an idea to develop and build upon: Consensus and cooperation are great and, (to return to Keats), “The energies displayed [in them] are fine,” but there will always be quarrels. It’s unavoidable. We have to plan, and act, accordingly.
The number one impulse I’ve nurtured over the years is cowardice, maybe politely categorized as “affability,” or, in more sanctimonious moments, “peace-making.” At some point, however, this savage world exposes it for what it really is: cowardice. We simply must be ready to take a stand, boldly, without affectation or bombast. You don’t have to “Bring Hell with you!” every time, say, someone slides into the parking space that your blinker clearly indicated you intended to take, but when someone threatens your livelihood, family, or even what you can and cannot say? Yeah, that’s when you need to be somebody’s huckleberry.