Being the 55th edition of Assorted Nonsense, the official newsletter of Donovan Street Press Inc.
Bullies
When I was four years old my family moved to a new house on the other side of town. I was excited. Especially after I found the previous occupants had left a toy plastic gun behind in the new house.
What budding bully wouldn’t like a new toy gun?
Outside, I wandered across the street to a field where a couple of kids just a bit older than me were playing. I mentioned to them that my mother had just baked some cookies. They said bring us some cookies and we’ll let you play with us. Mom gave me cookies for all of us and I brought them over. The kids promptly took their cookies, stole mine, and chased me back home.
That was my first experience with bullies.
Later, elementary school featured the obligatory bullies. I remember around the age of six standing on a merry-go-round packed with kids. I was having a pretty merry time until some tough-looking kid told me to get off the merry-go-round so that he could get on.
“No,” I told him.
He slapped me hard across the face.
Never having been slapped in the face before, I was shocked. I remember clearly wanting to retaliate by punching this kid in the face. I also clearly remembering why I didn’t: I was afraid that if I punched him, I’d hurt him. It had less to do with fear of being slapped again then it did me simply not wanting to hurt someone else.
I stepped off the merry-go-round, and he got on.
I don’t think I ever saw that kid again. I have no idea what happened to him.
There was another kid that used to terrorize a few of us. He’d push us around, get us in headlocks, that sort of thing. I never thought about punching this kid in the face: he radiated menace. You didn’t want to mess with him. I have no idea where he wound up either.
The only other real bully I can remember from childhood was a slightly older kid who, with a handful of cronies standing by, menaced me and some friends one memorable day when we were about twelve. I do know where this guy wound up; I saw him this past summer. We waved hello to one another because even though I don’t think we’ve ever spoken to one other in the intervening years we do know who one another is. I proceeded to spend about an hour in this guy’s presence, and all I could think about the entire time was that day forty-eight years earlier. I would say that he probably doesn’t even remember it except that I bet he does. I wondered if I’d forgiven him for several fairly unpleasant minutes of psychological cruelty on his part. I wondered if, not so deep down, he was the same cruel guy. I mentioned all this to a mutual acquaintance later that day and he assured me that yes, this fellow was pretty much the same dude he’d been back then.
I’ve always imagined that these guys had terrible home lives. That probably their parents hit them. Or their brothers. Or maybe their sisters. And that they’ve since spent time in prison. I have no idea whether any of that is true. Probably not.
So, poor Joe. He got a bit bullied as a kid. Well, two things about that. First, I obviously got off fairly easily. Despite being a pencil-necked geek with arms like twigs that was pretty much it for people bullying me back in grade school. I didn’t really run into any more bullies until I started working for a living. But before we talk about that, and this is thing two, I must confess that I am not worthy of casting the first stone because, as much as it pains me to admit it, I am not entirely innocent.
It’s astonishing, isn’t it? How events decades earlier can still have a grip on you, making you cry out in disgust or shame or embarrassment as you recall them.
It’s Grade Five and there’s a kid in my class named Shelley. Shelley is not exactly popular. People call her Smelly. One day the teacher asks me to pick a fellow classmate for some activity and I decide to pick Shelley. I have a nanosecond to decide whether to call her by her name or by what some of my classmates call her. I opt for the approval of my peers and select the epithet. The class erupts in laughter. The teacher (stunned, I’d like to think, that little Joey Mahoney said such a thing) scolds me instantly. I can only imagine what Shelley must have felt like. I am appalled at myself even now. Has Shelley ever seen me since, spent time in my presence? Does she wonder if I’m the same cruel kid I was back then?
For what it’s worth at this late date, I am sorry, Shelley.
Now. Bullies in the workplace.
The first is a guy who threw temper tantrums in the studio. Something would go sideways and he’d lash out at the people around him. I witnessed this happen a few times as a young tech. Once, I was the recipient.
“Have you considered the possibility that maybe you’re stupid?” he asked me in the studio one day, after I had trouble finding a patch.
Later, as a manager, I adopted a zero tolerance policy toward the bullying of my employees, and it was a direct result of my experience with this guy. I refused to put up with it, and more than once complained to the managers of people who bullied my team, and insisted they deal with it.
This got a bit more challenging when the bullies were higher up the totem pole than me.
About three years into my management career, which up until that point had been all about radio, and as such had been fairly pleasant, I wound up managing a team responsible for maintaining television production systems. On one of my first days up in the Land of Television I saw a sign taped to a door that read:
“The television business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side.”
It’s a bastardization of an apocryphal quote attributed to Hunter S. Thompson. There were days I felt some truth to it.
One day early on, shadowing the senior manager of television maintenance, I attended a meeting populated by a bunch of other managers, several of whom I didn’t know at the time. During a discussion about integrating radio and television maintenance support, an older man I didn’t know suggested that some of my radio maintenance team should be able to take on supporting television systems in what I considered an unreasonably short time frame.
I soon found myself in a fairly intense argument with this guy. I didn’t know him from a hole in the ground. I was pretty sure that I was right and that he was wrong so I stuck to my ground. Nobody else in the room chimed in, except, eventually, the fellow I’d been shadowing, and I could tell from his manner that he was trying to thread a needle, that of sticking up for me, his protege, while not unduly pissing off the guy I was arguing with.
“You do know who that was, don’t you?” the senior manager asked me after the meeting.
“No, who?”
Turned out he was an infamous television executive, and I would cross paths with him several times over the next few years, and from that day forward he never liked me and I never liked him. And you’ll just have to take my word for this: there are very few people I actively dislike. You have to actually make a concerted effort for me to decide to not like you. In his case, he achieved it by constantly attempting to intellectually one-up everybody around him. Intellectual bullying, in other words.
And the reason I took exception to it was because it had a chilling effect on everybody around him. You could not have an honest meeting with this man in the room because everybody was afraid of him. He almost always outranked everybody present and was known to have fired people he didn’t approve of, so why would you risk telling him to his face what you really thought? This is not a path to positive outcomes.
The last time I encountered genuine bullying in my career happened about five years before I retired. I was a low ranking executive myself by this time. I was in a room with three other people: a lawyer, a chief-of staff, and an executive director. I knew everyone in the room, but it was only my second time meeting the executive director. The meeting began inauspiciously when the executive director accused me outright of bungling something. I was taken completely unawares. For one thing, the thing she was accusing me of bungling had virtually nothing to do with me. It wasn’t even my department’s responsibility. But she made me feel like an incompetent nitwit in front of the two other people in the room.
It seemed to me that she was taking advantage of her lofty position as executive director to lord it over someone she considered inferior, probably expecting to cow me into submission for reasons I frankly still don’t comprehend. Fortunately, I had about thirty years experience behind me at this point. After a few seconds of pointlessly shuffling papers, trying to find evidence to defend myself, I set the papers down and spoke candidly.
“Look,” I said. “You have actually managed to provoke a strong emotional response in me. I may actually have to leave the room to collect myself.”
It may seem an odd thing to say but it was true. You know the expression about blood boiling? That’s what it felt like. My blood literally felt like it was boiling. I think I was blushing. I could hardly speak. But speak I did.
“You seem to be under the misapprehension that I work for a department that I don’t. I have nothing to do with what you’re talking about. And that hardly matters because what you said to me you shouldn’t have in front of these two.” I jerked a thumb at the lawyer and the chief-of-staff.
I was trying to find the right words handicapped by the outrage I was feeling, an emotion I hardly ever feel so intensely. “Any conversation about a problem you might have with me or my work should have taken place privately, between just you and me, behind closed doors.”
The other two sat silently in the face of this. The executive director babbled for a bit but finally made a half-assed apology. And then I confronted the task of trying to behave professionally and calmly for the rest of the meeting while really just wanting to bolt. But I thought it was important to take the high road.
Later, the chief-of-staff made a point to tell me she was impressed with the way I’d handled the situation, which I appreciated. Curious, I approached someone I knew to be a friend of the executive director’s to try to gain some insight into her behaviour.
“Does she normally do that sort of thing?” I asked.
“No,” I was told.
And interestingly, every time I crossed paths with her later, she was exceedingly friendly to me. I interpreted this to mean that she regretted her behaviour. I was friendly back. I forgave her. But you don’t forget behaviour like that. You might forget what people say to you, but you never forget how they made you feel.
Alas, I am also not completely innocent in this regard.
I’ve interviewed many people for jobs over the years. As a hiring manager, you obviously have the upper hand. The people you’re interviewing are usually nervous. It goes without saying that they should be treated with respect and compassion. And I think I’ve mostly managed this. But one day we interviewed a guy who happened to mention that he’d written a thesis for school. By this point it was fairly obvious that he wasn’t going to be the successful candidate for the position we were looking to fill.
“What was your thesis about?” I asked him.
Silence.
There were three of us interviewing him. It was three against one.
I was thinking, he brought up the thesis, he allegedly wrote the thesis, he should be able to tell us what the thesis was about.
The silence dragged on. I had asked the question; it was up to me to let him off the hook. But I didn’t, and the silence continued. Beads of sweat may have appeared on his brow. He started and stopped a couple of times. He couldn’t answer the question; couldn’t describe the thesis he’d written. And still I didn’t let him off the hook.
After what felt like an eternity, he finally spouted something that could have had something to do with a thesis he’d once written.
He didn’t get the job.
And I defended the prolonged, uncomfortable, squirm-inducing silence to myself and my colleagues by suggesting that, well, he should know how to describe his own thesis, and now he’ll be better prepared for his next interview.
But in my heart I know the truth. That I had been in a position of power, and I had abused that power, and had been the bad guy.
The bully.
A Peculiar Symmetry
by Tanah Haney
Aiden and Minnie. Two of the least ordinary people you’re likely to meet.
Aiden’s missing the first eight years of her life, yet she can play Beethoven’s Concerto without ever having been taught. Minnie can see people’s emotions, in vivid colour, no less. That doesn’t help much when she meets Aiden, who doesn’t seem to have any.
When British Intelligence sweeps in, along with belligerent spies and a half-brother Aiden never knew existed, Minnie soon discovers that whatever Aiden might lack, she more than makes up for in intrigue. Getting to know one another will have to wait, though; when bullets start to fly, and the bodies begin to pile up, the two young women find themselves caught up in a clandestine war for control over the human psyche…and their own lives.
The book is exceptionally well-crafted. ~ Dave Morris, Amazon Review
About the Author:
When not writing, Tanah Haney divides her time between playing the Celtic harp, teaching music, gardening and cat wrangling. She is a published poet and is co-author of Where the World Bleeds Through with her husband, photographer and digital artist Mark A. Harrison.
The character of Aiden in Tanah’s debut novel, A Peculiar Symmetry, was inspired by Tanah’s own experience with neurodiversity. Late diagnosed with ADHD at age 50 but neurodivergent from day one, Tanah is determined to be a more vocal champion of everyone who has ever felt different, and for the free expression of same in a diverse, inclusive, and compassionate society.
Tanah lives in Peterborough, Ontario, with her husband Mark and a small but vocal menagerie.
Podcast
Re-Creative: a podcast about creativity and the works that inspire it.
Mark A. Rayner and I recently took part in Podcasthon, "The world’s largest podcast charity initiative, bringing together podcasters globally to raise awareness for charitable causes."
We dedicated an episode of Re-Creative to support Meals on Wheels Summerside, a charity my mother, Rosaleen Mahoney, and my sister, Susan Rodgers, have supported for years.
The episode we're dedicating to Meals on Wheels features Ruth Abernethy, a sculptor of some of the most iconic public art in Canada. If you've heard this episode before, it's worth another listen. If you haven't heard it, we think you'll enjoy checking it out.
Please join us in supporting Podcasthon and Meals on Wheels!
All previous episodes are available online, comprising the first 3 seasons, over 60 conversations with creative people from all walks of life about the art stoking their imaginative fires.
Thanks for reading!
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This has been the 55th edition of Assorted Nonsense, the official newsletter of Donovan Street Press Inc.
Good stuff Joe. It reminds me a lot of my own relationship to both sides of bullying.
Great read, and an interesting topic, especially in this day and age. I hope it was somewhat therapeutic to put it all down in writing. Maybe I should try that.