Ever know one of those assholes who are in a position of power and use their position to lord their religious convictions over their underlings?

Bullies of Every Type Suck

When I was consulting, one of my clients was a very respected newspaper organization.  I had the opportunity to work at one of their newspapers in the Southern U.S.

I was conducting training for their Human Resources department…five employees of the newspaper, including the head of HR for the newspaper, who seemed to wield a lot of power in the organization.  She was smart, but she was also a mean and vengeful bully.

At one point during the training, someone pointed out that my computer screen, that was being displayed on the big screen in front of the class, had gone to a screen saver.  As I went to fix the issue, I muttered, “Good God.”

At this point, Ms. Self-Righteous stands up and says, “Yes, He is good, and stop using His name in vain.” (I inferred the capital H’s)

I didn’t have any rebuttal or clever retorts for this, so I just replied, “Got it.” and continued on with my training.  But I was pissed.

In a room with only her direct reports and an outside consultant, she could afford to be a soldier of Christ and defend his good honor from a heathen like me and try to make me look foolish in front of the group.  I have to admit, if she had said, “Excuse me, but I’m uncomfortable listening to someone use His name in the way you did.”  Or if she had pulled me aside to tell me the same thing, I would have taken full responsibility for being insensitive to my audience.

As a consultant, I opted not to respond in any way, but I also didn’t look for any other opportunities to go back there.  To me, that kind of behavior goes against all of what Jesus taught and it was completely self-serving for her to puff out her chest in public and demonstrate to all the little people how important she is in her Christian faith.  And if there is a heaven, and that woman is going there, then I’d prefer not to go, thank you very much.

Current Knitting

Made a bit of progress on both my two knitting projects.

I’ve got about 2 feet to go to finish the edging on the blanket (so exciting for me!) and I’ve completed about 2 feet on the Ric Rack scarf.