The Wonderful World of Work

As regular readers of mine will know only too well, Narcissism is something of a pet subject with me. Now, pretty much all I have written so far has been about Narcissism in personal relationships. However, I must admit that Narcissism is in fact very prevalent in just about all other spheres of our daily lives. It can be observed in action in such a wide variety of situations. It is particularly noticeable in the worlds of entertainment, business and industry, sports, education, immediate families of many siblings and even neighbourhood interactions.

Here I will touch upon a few examples of how it has affected me during a long lifetime of situations, beginning with school.

Way back in the mid-sixties I was a very thin, undernourished, introverted ten-year-old boy who was scared of his own shadow. As a result of this, I passed a truly horrendous time at a Catholic secondary modern school. It seemed like not a day passed without me getting a thump or a full-on beating, from teachers and fellow pupils alike. In fact, I am of the mind that these days my so-called teachers would end up in jail for quite a long time for the brutality they dished out on a daily basis.

In my first or second year, there was one particular event that to this day haunts me still. There was a boy, who I shall only name as Steven, who was jealous of a good piece of work I had produced in metal work class. One day, to scupper my progress, the boy threw a coat hanger I had made into a bath full of acid. And that was just the start of his evil actions.

Later on in that session, whilst I was changing the bit on an industrial lathe, Steven came up behind me unseen. Very stealthily he reached under my outstretched arm, which was inside the top of the lathe holding onto a chuck key, which was inserted into the chuck. Steven touched the green button to start the machine and suddenly I felt my arm being dragged inside the machine. I quickly let go of the key and pulled my arm out of the machine. My elbow flew into Steven’s face and almost broke his nose. Good, served him right. However, that only made him more determined to cause me harm and hurt me.

Later on in the day, waiting in a corridor to go into a biology lesson, Steven stood behind me. Suddenly, he stepped from behind me and spat a horrible gob of green snot into the left ear of a boy called Barry, in front of me. Then Steven very quickly jumped back behind me.

Barry in front of me turned as he felt inside his ear. He pulled the big disgusting mucus from his ear and called me some disgusting name or other. I plead my innocence and indicated that it was sly Steven, all to no avail. Steven called me a liar and Barry believed him. “I’ll get you for that later,” Barry said. And most certainly, after school, in the street, he did indeed get me. In fact, Barry and about fifteen other schoolboy thugs beat the holy shit out of me and almost left me for dead.

Coming out of the school’s main gate, only about 100 yards from home, I was seized by the large gang of bloodthirsty thugs and frog-marched across the road to a short passageway at the end of a parade of shops. I had a cigarette thrust into my mouth and was forced to breathe in. Then they formed a circle and span me around whilst shoving me from one side of the tightly knit circle to the other. Then, when I was suitably dizzy, I was shoved onto the ground. Barry jumped on me and sat on my chest. With my arms trapped by my sides by his strong legs, Barry grabbed my two ears tightly and started to lift my young head and bang it back down onto the hard pavement with great force. Then, when Barry tired of the effort of doing that, he stopped and started to punch me in my defenceless face.

Sitting on a nearby wall was my elder brother, who had been instructed by my mother to look out for me. He sat and did nothing. The fact of the matter was my brother hated me and took great joy in seeing me get beaten up. When I later asked him why he had not intervened, especially since he was fifteen years old and easily able to help me, he gave me the lame excuse “I was waiting to see how long it would be before you learned to fight.”

Fortunately, a female neighbour intervened and rescued me. I had a fractured skull, a broken nose and two black eyes. This was Narcissistic collateral damage at its worst. I can tell you, when I got home my mother screamed in horror at what had happened to me. I was sent to the hospital and my father was sent around to Barry’s house to inform his parents about what their son and his cronies had done to me.

About two weeks later Barry’s father went to a twelve-story block of apartments, went up to the roof, and jumped to his death. I am not saying that he did that because of what his young son had done to me. But maybe it was the last straw in a highly dysfunctional family.

As for the school, they never did seem to understand that extreme physical violence begets extreme physical violence.

Well, I have to say that event was the worst of it, though it was not in any way an isolated incident. I got beat at school, in the street and at home by my elder brother and sister. I also got sexually abused by that elder sister and a nearby male neighbour. They both told that ten-year-old, very afraid boy that I was, that if he ever said anything to anybody, they would kill him. So he said nothing.

I did at one point take to playing truancy to escape the violence but got caught out after about two weeks, more’s the pity. I spent the entire four years of my secondary education in what they called a remedial class and finally left with not a single qualification. I was good for nothing.

On a less depressing note, many years later, after one dead-end job after another, I went to evening classes for three years to get enough qualifications to go to university, where I got an excellent first degree in 1984. I then went back to university for my second degree in Education in 1994. What a world of difference that education was. I absolutely adored being at uni.

And to put an end note to my dysfunctional family; I was one of eight children and these days I have contact with only one. I haven’t spoken to my elder brother in decades. Not a very nice person at all. A total and utter asshole in fact.

The real end to that family was when my mother passed away in 2012. Four of my brothers and sisters had so abused my mother in her old age that she disinherited them. And they were so angry that two of my younger sisters came around to my mum’s house, where she reposed in her coffin, to give me a damn good hiding because my mother had left me a substantial sum in her will and them nothing. It might surprise you to hear that both of those awful females are professional nurses working in state hospitals!

Amazingly the police failed to prosecute with the excuse that it was “Not in the public interest.” Really? Am I not the public? Oh well, good riddance to bad rubbish.

I have to say, my last day at that school was a day of pure, unadulterated joy. No more beatings by violent idiots, both pupils and staff. How little did I know what was to come. As I was soon to discover, the big world of work outside, was ten times worse.

My very first proper job was as an assistant motor mechanic at a local car repair garage. I will not regale you with everything that went on there, but it left a lot to be desired.

I worked under a foreman called George Harrison, no not the Beatle of that name. And I have used his real name this time because a)he deserves it and b)he is probably long since dead, hopefully. If he is still alive he will be about 100 years old.

George was a very disgruntled man with a disabled daughter and a chronically ill wife. And he took all of his pent-up frustrations out on me, a fifteen-year-old greenhorn. He insulted me all day long, telling me I was shit, and threw tools at me. Yes, screwdrivers and spanners bloody well hurt a lot when they hit you at great speed. At one point he almost blew my head off with an oxyacetylene torch and an exhaust pipe full of gas. As it was, he merely burned my eyelashes and eye bows to a cinder and blinded me for about half an hour.

And then we come to somebody who is one of the most evil, disgusting, dangerous bastards I have ever had the misfortune to meet, who I shall refer to as simply FT.

One day this goon, just for fun, came up behind me and shoved a Mini tyre over my head and past my shoulders to trap my arms by my sides. Then he got in front of me and pushed me on my back. Then he dragged me into the toilets, well away from anywhere anybody could help me.

He then shoved me into a cubicle, onto the floor, to trap me between the narrow walls of the cubicle. Then he went to the street outside and found a dirty ice lolly stick on the pavement, next to a pile of dog shit. He daubed the stick with the canine excrement and returned to the toilets to force my lips apart so that he could shove the shitty stick inside my mouth and paste my teeth and gums with the foul cack. And still, he wasn’t finished!

FT then went to get the oxyacetylene bottles and wheeled them into the toilets. Then he opened the tap and shoved the torch under the cubicle door. The next thing he did was light matches and throw them into the gas-filled cubicle, trying to blow me up. I really could not invent this type of monstrous behaviour towards a young teenager half his age.

This thug’s other speciality was thieving. He stole car parts and accessories from the garage stores department, things of value from customer cars and brand new tools I had only just bought. He quickly scratched his name on my tools and swore that they were his.

Fortunately, he was such a useless mechanic and incurable thief that he was eventually fired. And if everything he did was not a type of Perverse Narcissism, then I do not know what is.

A good few years after that nightmare of a job, I found myself working for a new independent record label, owned and run by a man I shall refer to as AJR.

The label had a good deal of success and through dint of all of our hard work over two years, it managed to accumulate a substantial sum of money in the bank.

Getting very close to Christmas AJR invited us all, a small team of just four, to a pub across the road from our premises. We had been promised a nice Christmas surprise for all of our efforts. We were thinking perhaps of a nice cash bonus or something of good value.

At lunch, AJR told us that he would not be paying for lunch and that in fact, we should pay for his lunch in view of what he was about to gift us. Sat around a dining room table were each handed an A4 manilla envelope. We excitedly opened the envelope to find inside a share certificate, making each one of us a co-owner of the company. Wowwwww.....I was just twenty-one years old and I, and my colleagues, each part owned a very successful record label. Amazing huh?

By the following Monday, we discovered that AJR had taken all of the money from the bank account and disappeared to who knows where.

The whole thing was a massive con, designed to run off with what was then probably about a quarter of a million pounds in today’s money. And we had been set up as a small group of patsies, responsible for about 200,000 pounds worth of debt. We even had the privilege of paying for the swine’s Christmas lunch and didn’t get our final month’s salary cheque. Of course, the company went into liquidation and the liquidator believed our true story.

About forty years later he popped up on the internet as a music teacher who does school visits where he preaches to young school kids how to be aware of a music business that is infested by conniving scum, just like him.

He did try to befriend me on LinkedIn. Can you believe that? Needless to say, I dumped that request in the bin.

And so, after that little fraudulent trick, I found myself once more on the scrap heap of dead-end jobs. Then, not too many years later, I decided to try to recover my lost education and got myself off to university for my first degree.

After graduation I found myself working in a very big, prestigious advertising agency as a copywriter. Oh boy, is that ever a world of work full to bursting of over-ambitious, overreaching, talentless, backstabbing, ego-maniacs. Talk about fake it until you make it. Narcissism? Oh, I reckon this is the home of narcissists, on an industrial scale.

There was one particular individual called DE who was away on holiday when I started. And I was sat at his desk until he returned. Now this was part of a practical joke at his expense. He was so disliked that when he returned he was told that I was his replacement, and he presumed that I was in on that joke and became an instant enemy. Did I mention how insecure a lot of those creative types are? You better believe it. And the reason they were so insecure was that a lot of them knew they crap at their higher-than-average salaried job, and it was only a matter of time until they were found out and ousted.

To avoid this fate DE had a nasty little trick that he was very well known for. By virtue of his gift of the gab and self-promotion bullshit, he had become a creative group leader. And his little trick was to steal ideas of the far better-talented people under him and present them to the higher-ups as all his own work. He was also known to present his awful ideas as belonging to anybody he wanted to get rid of. The arch-narcissist is what DE was, not that it got him very far.

In time, I became so good at the job of copywriting that, within six months, I was headhunted by another agency as the head of copy for all of the agency’s creative output. Wonderful, a senior position at last. I was finally on the ladder that lead to great success. Errrrr….nope. Scuppered by good old DE in my new position.

Within a year, back at my first agency, there had been a change of CEO and the new man was an arch-enemy of DE so immediately found a reason to fire him. Then one day going downstairs to reception, I gazed out of a window that looked out onto the agency carpark and saw, horror of horrors, DE parking his car.

Fearing the worst I ran to our CEO’s office to warn him off offering DE a job but I was too late, he’d already been hired, as my new boss. Good lord, how I dreaded what was to come, and with good reason.

To stamp his authority over me DE embarked on a narcissistic campaign of smearing me and generally making my working life as miserable as he possibly could.

First, he started with petty things, like turning off the heating in my office whenever I left the room for an hour to work with my art director teammate Rob. Then Rob told me that DE had stopped including me in creative meetings, denying me full access to the brief for an ad campaign. He also stole my great ideas and presented them as his, and his crap ideas he presented as mine. Before long the higher up’s lost confidence in me and did not want to hear what DE had been doing to me.

The next move DE made was to banish me from my nice big office and put me in a broom-cupboard-sized room. And at one point he threatened to punch me in the face in a very sly sort of way. Finally, he called me to his office and told me I should look for another job. And he very craftily waited to tell me that devastating news until all those in the agency who might have supported me had gone away for the week. I was absolutely furious with the swine. And I have to say, I did not react very well at all.

“So you’re firing me then David?”

“No, simply suggesting that you look for another job.”

“On what basis?”

“You’re not actually that good at copywriting.”

“Says who exactly?”

“Errr…..me, actually.”

“You? You’re shit at it. All you do is steal other people’s ideas and present them as your own. You, sir, are a grandstanding, bullshit merchant who couldn’t write a shopping list.”

Then I stood up and walked over to his office door, which I locked from the inside. Then I strode over to the big sash window and hauled it up its runners. I looked down to the carpark, three stories below. Then I glanced over at DE sitting at his desk with a look of fear etched onto his slimy face.

“What are you doing?” he trembled.

“What do you think you piece of shit? I’m going to throw you out of this window, and nobody is going to get in to save you.”

I swear the man was crapping himself. Of course, I would never, ever throw anybody out of any window. I just wanted to put the fear of god into the horrible swine for a few minutes before I left for good. After what he had put me through he deserved no less.

After a few minutes, I softened and just unlocked his door and left. I could have sworn I heard a loud sigh of great relief. As for me, he actually did me the biggest favour ever. I was tired of internal politics and internecine warfare that was common to all agencies and I went freelance. OMG

Within a month I was earning 150 pounds an hour. Lordy lordy, I wish I could earn that sort of money now. At last, by pure chance, I had arrived at the top of the earning tree and within three years my family and I had moved into a quarter of a million-pound house. We were awash with money.

The thing with going freelance is that unlike working full-time for an agency, there is no hiding place. If you really are no good, word gets around and before too long nobody wants to hire you. Clearly, DE was wrong, wrong, wrong about me and my ability. At last, I got the better of a narcissist. Sadly things did not go too well for him. It gives me no pleasure to report that at the young age of fifty six, he had a heart attack running in a half marathon and passed away.

Well back in the eighties, thanks to Margaret Thatcher’s boom-and-bust political policies, everybody was raking it in, earning pots and pots of money. Then 1990 came along and brought with it the bust part of Tory policies and all was lost. First, I lost all my clients, then I lost my career. It was all over and I was forced to make a change of career. By chance, I found a variety of jobs in education.

Most of my jobs in education went reasonably well, but there was one particular secondary modern school that will remain in my memory bank for all the wrong reasons.

The vast majority of my young students were great, except for two disagreeable individuals, one male, who thankfully I had very little to do with, and the other female who was a narcissist wannabe.

This girl, who I shall call ES, was such a chatterbox and a terrible distraction for me whenever I was trying to give the class their instructions for a project or homework. One day I had had quite enough of this highly irritating individual. ES just would not shut up as I tried to very calmly speak to the class. Chatter, chatter, chatter…..When I asked her to be quiet for a few moments, she just chose to completely ignore me.

Eventually, I shouted at her very loudly. She did not like that one little bit. The look on her face said, “Who the hell do you think you are telling me, the queen of the school, to be quiet?” What I did not know was the reason the little madam was so self-entitled was that her self-important mother was the head of the Parents Teacher Association and the best friend of the Polish headmaster.

Later on in the afternoon, it came to me that little Miss “I will do the hell what I please.” had decided to teach me a lesson not to tangle with somebody as important as her.

My superior came to see me in private and told me that ES had complained to her mother, who in turn complained to the headmaster, that I had shouted at her using obscene language, which was a complete lie. The headmaster took the decision to fire me.

About an hour or so later, my superior came to see me again to say “Hey Liam, I think you’re going to be ok. The girl has now changed her story and confessed that you did not use bad language to her, so I think you’ll be able to stay.”

At the end of the afternoon, the headmaster called me into his office and said “We are letting you go for using bad language in this highly reputable Catholic school” (Don’t ya just love self-righteous Catholics? I am a lapsed one).

I told him “I did not use bad language sir, and I believe that the girl has confessed that she lied about me to get me in trouble, because she did not like being told to be quiet in class whilst I was trying to teach, headmaster.”

“Who told you that?” he said angrily.

“It doesn’t matter who told me, sir, I am innocent.”

“Well my decision was made on that basis and I am sticking to it.”

So in the end, I did leave, but not before insisting on three months’ salary to compensate me for unfair dismissal, which he gladly agreed to.

In the following months, the school was closed down by OFSTED for appallingly low standards of management by the headmaster. Better still, the last time I saw ES she was in a supermarket on her knees stacking shelves and scrubbing the floor. Proofs positive that there is a god, and he does not like nasty little narcissists.

And so I come to the world of entertainment, or to be more precise, the world of theatre, film and television. In yet another change in my career, I went to a private institute in Bubwith, in the north of Yorkshire, called ARTTS International. Now this one got going pretty darn nastily almost from the get-go.

This residential institute was owned and run by a psychopath called John Sichel. He had an impressive record according to Wiki, but I was singularly unimpressed with his manner. I had booked in for a two-week course in film and tv (costing 500 pounds sterling) but after the first week, I was forced to leave due to this man’s scarily threatening manner towards me, for absolutely no good reason at all.

I was in a small group of six, five females and me. And out of those six, by the end of the week, only two remained. Here’s why.

I arrived at the institute on a Sunday afternoon and checked in and was shown to my quarters. I met the rest of my group and liked them all right from the very start. They were very friendly and warm and overall good fun.

The next morning we all got up and the ladies told me that they had been cold all night due to it being the back end of winter and very little bedding. They asked me if I would be their spokesperson and ask John Sichel if we could have some extra bedding.

I went outside to go to see John In his office, but just at that moment, I saw him crossing the yard to one of the other residential blocks. I called out to him and he stopped dead in his tracks. As I approached him he seemed to be normal. I told him they had said they had been cold during the night and that could we all have some extra bedding. For some reason, from his expression, I sensed that he was not best pleased with this intrusion.

“Go to my office and wait for me there,” he ordered. I had no idea what was to come next, it was truly shocking.

I went to his office and sat on a low sofa at the back of what seemed like a waiting area. Within a few minutes the enormous monster of a man, much taller than me at over six feet tall. He slammed the door and strode over to me in what I can only describe as an aggressive manner. Then he started to boom at me with a thunderous vexed voice.

“Right!” he said. “I know what you are up to, I know your sort, and I am here to tell you that I will NOT tolerate it, not for one moment.”

At that moment he was being so scary I looked down at the floor like a guilty, chided schoolboy.

“Will you look at me boy, I want to see those eyes. How dare you look at the floor when I am speaking to you.”

I slowly raised my gaze upwards and found myself looking into a pair of hard, unfeeling eyes that looked like they were about to kill me. It was a chilling moment

“Now you get out of my office right now, and let me hear no more from you during your stay here,” he ordered angrily.

I stood to leave. However, he suddenly blocked my path out of his office. He grabbed a side door and swung it wide open. It was a little side office with some middle-aged blond woman sitting at a desk.

“Now here’s my witness….” he said as he looked at the woman. Lord only knows what she thought of all this, or maybe she was used to it.

To her, he said, “….you heard him didn’t you, you heard what he said, did you not?” The woman meekly nodded. “Now get out!” he snarled. Then he stepped to one side to let me pass. I could not get away quickly enough.

I had not said a single word for that blond woman to hear, not a word passed my lips. Indeed, I’m not sure if even so much as a soft breath had come from my mouth. What in the hell was this sick idiot on about?

I was in such shock I could not even go back to the girls. I just took myself for a long walk down some lane at the side of the campus. Later on, I met up with the girls and told them what had happened. They were as shocked as I was. What in tarnation was the man’s problem? What sort of person did he think I was? What was he going to say to somebody, anybody, about what I was supposed to have said? Who knows what goes on in a sick narcissistic mind?

One of the girls told us that she had done some research on John Sichel and that he had been blackballed by the BBC, as well as by other tv companies around the world. What for, we could only guess.

At this point, I was all for walking away from this horror, but the girls pleaded with me to stay, so stay I did, more is the pity. As the week wore on, things just did not seem right. There was a very subdued atmosphere around the place as if everyone was in fear of the man.

Two other things began to bother me. First, the man began to stalk me. In the mornings I would go for an early morning walk to clear my head. The second day I suddenly felt I was being secretly watched, I was.

After turning around the corner of one block I stopped and looked back. John Sichel suddenly appeared behind me and just as suddenly dived back around the corner out of sight, like he had been caught doing something he should not have been doing. This went on every morning for the rest of the week.

Another strange thing that happened was things began to disappear from my room. Then they mysteriously turned back up two days later. What the hell this was all about I really do not know. Who took them and what for I don’t know. And if it was theft, why put them back two days later? Pretty weird stuff if you ask me.

In the end, I could take no more. I told the girls the following Sunday evening I was going and they fully understood. As we stood there chatting in the carpark somebody from somewhere in the darkness began to throw stones at us, or maybe it was just at me. It was time to go.

On Monday morning I called John Sichel from the safe distance of my home to tell him I had left, and he did not sound very pleased.

“Well if you demand your money back, I will report you to your sponsor and tell them exactly what sort of a person you are and what you got up to, I’ve got my witnesses”

What the hell was this fool on, I wondered. I had asked a perfectly civilised question about extra blankets, and that was all I did. I was in such shock with the horrendous verbal on-slaught and Kafka-esque false accusations, the worrying stalking and things going missing out of my room…I couldn’t even concentrate on the course activities required of me. I was on high alert the whole time I was there.

To this day I did not know what the devil that was all about. It was as if I had stumbled into some mental institution and bumped into its most seriously ill mental patient. This was far beyond narcissism, this was bona fide, off the bloody scale, scary as hell mental breakdown.

A few months later I found myself chatting to a BBC programme editor about John Sichel and asked if he knew anything about him. The elderly man said softly, almost fearfully, for fear of being overheard. “Yes, a very bad lot I’m afraid. I remember him well. I can’t say too much, but he is somebody who we speak of very little and only in hushed tones, and it is not out of respect or reverence.” All I could come up with was that John Sichel was a troubled, scary, narcissistic, psychopath.

And my final port of call takes me full circle, all the way back to where I started my working life, in the motor trade. Only this time, not as a car mechanic, but as a car salesman. I signed a contract for forty hours a week for OTE (On Target Earnings) of fifty thousand pounds a year. It was a basic plus commission, and I ended up working eighty to a hundred hours a week for less than fifteen thousand a year. How come? Because the commission matrix is deliberately rigged to diddle you out of almost every single dime of your commission. The dealer principal, the owner, is nothing less than a narcissistic, megalomaniac who is totally obsessed with money. And the owner will burn you out and throw you away like you are nothing more than a piece of garbage fit only for the bin.

“A megalomaniac is a pathological egotist, that is, someone with a psychological disorder with symptoms like delusions of grandeur and an obsession with power. We also use the word megalomaniac more informally for people who behave as if they’re convinced of their absolute power and greatness.”

https://www.vocabulary.com › dictionary › megalomaniac

Narcissism is an exaggerated sense of self-love while megalomania is an exaggerated sense of self-worth based on fantasies of power, attractiveness and other physical or psychological attributes, therefore, all megalomaniacs are narcissists, but not all narcissists are megalomaniacs. Jul 21, 2020

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My final piece on suffering ungrateful swine came along in the form of a man to who I took pity and lent an enormous helping hand. Ha, never again. They do say, no favour goes unpunished.

After two years of hard slog selling new and second-hand cars things were going well for the dealership, if not for me. One day a very smart-looking guy came into the showroom to buy a beautiful, almost new, Italian sports car. The gentleman told me that it was the fulfilment of a lifelong dream.I was happy for him.

About a month later the man returned looking very down. He told me he had lost his job and could no longer afford the monthly payments. He wanted to know if we would buy the car back from him. I asked the sales manager and he said no, we still had three of the same model to sell before we bought even just one more. So MC, as I shall call him, slumped off back out of the showroom.

Another month later and MC was back to buy some carpet mats for his car. I said hello and had he got another job yet. He said no. Then, to help him, I suddenly had a brainwave and told him to go and sit at my desk.

I went to speak with the sales manager and told him that business had become so good we needed an extra pair of hands, and I had the perfect candidate for the job sitting at my desk. The sales manager agreed that we needed help and told me to send MC into his office for an interview.

In the end, MC got the job based on his smart appearance and previous experience as a salesman. However, it later turned out that a salesman he was not. He was what we call an order taker. People rang his office already wanting to place an order, and all MC had to do was write down the details.

To be a car salesman you have to be able to sell a car, negotiate a deal and then close that deal. Not as easy as it sounds. And MC was totally useless at it. In his first month, he did not sell a single car. So the sales manager told me I had to teach MC how to sell cars. It was hard work, I can tell you.

Lo and behold, suddenly like opening a tap, MC began to sell cars. I felt happy for him, though not for long when I discovered how he had suddenly become an ace car salesman.

One morning we were having a sales meeting in the sales manager’s office. Each salesman was to give a round-up of his latest deals. As MC started to reel off all of his deals, naming each buyer, I was aghast to realise that he had been stealing all my deals from my diary.

I had appointed all of MC’s buyers to visit the showroom and sign up for the purchase with me. When they came into the showroom on the appointed day, whilst I was busy up in the parts department, MC told them I had a day off, but he said that he would sort them out. I had specifically told him that when my appointments arrived he was to tannoy me to go to my desk. I cannot tell you how betrayed I felt. MC wasn’t just biting the hand that fed him, he was chewing my arm off.

I had it out with MC several times that what he was doing was basically stealing commission from me, all to no avail. In fact, he continued to the point that my sales figures were down so much, I lost my job. How is that for gratitude? Narcissistic or what? You betcha it was, though it didn’t do him any good in the long run.

Throughout my life, I have always tried to be kind and helpful to people. And many times that way to be has been reciprocated. But far too many times a life-changing helping hand to somebody in trouble has been repaid with a life-changing stab in the back. However……

I do very firmly believe in karma, mister universe will always take care of business, so I don’t have to. Of course, it gives me no pleasure to tell you that less than a few months later MC went on holiday somewhere with high cliffs and walking along the precipice with his lover, he fell down all the way to the rocks. Splat, dead as a Dodo. Some suggested he perhaps didn’t fall, he was pushed. Who knows?

And so we reach the end of this sorry sojourn through my working history of psychopathic, narcissistic, pathological liars that I have known. If you can learn anything from it, and manage to avoid just one per cent of the pain I have suffered, then it has been more than well worth the writing.

Finally, please do allow me to say, that over all those years of dealing with some of the most horrid devils, in disguise as normal working people, I have also had the sheer joy of meeting and working with some of the most amazingly kind, good-hearted, totally sane people. And it is those people who kept me going through the toughest of times when I really did believe that all was lost. Remember, you never walk alone.