There was this guy I worked with a few years back, we'll call him "Lumbering Cow." I mean, we actually did call him that in private because fuck that guy.

He was the worst example of humanity I've ever encountered. A lazy, surly, middle-aged asshole. You know that age where a lot of guys become more alpha gorilla than man? He was that age.

He was condescending and stupid, which is a fantastic combination. He talked down to everyone younger than him, all smirky like. He'd been transferred to our facility because he'd been caught stealing speakers at his old facility, but because the union was so ironclad they couldn't fire him.

So he gets transferred to us. He gets caught sleeping on the job constantly. Can't get fired, we tried. He's unsafe, and we were working at great heights around children. We document all of his dangerous errors, no one cares. I catch him sitting in a shed, where he'd been listening to the radio and not working for roughly four hours, and then he cusses me out when I tell him to get back to work. I report the outburst, nothing.

He would threaten to fight people, ala, "you wanna take this outside?" We'd report him, nothing.

Anyway, he made me a worse person because he made me discover hate. I'd never hated anyone before. I thought I had, but no. Thoughts of how much I hated him would keep me up at night. I'd go over his words and my words over and over in the middle of the night, staring at the ceiling. My coworkers and I wished injury on him, illness, death. There was a point where more than a few of us at one point honestly wish real death on him. How much better our lives would be.

I eventually realized how filled with poisonous hate I was. I never thought I'd be that person.

He eventually got fired, miraculously, when the managers caught him working at a different shop while he was on disability from our shop. As soon as money got involved, the organization was able to fire him. Naturally.

I've tried to take a lesson from that experience about hate and letting things go, but I feel diminished for having been that way.