My Mistake, Thanks for pointing it out again

I don’t get mean spirited people.

I don’t get stupid people or Neapolitan ice cream. Just pick a flavor for crying out loud.

A friend, I worked with years ago, and I once discussed the impression you make on people. The whole point to the conversation was that in many cases you get one shot at making an impression; anything after that is just a crapshoot. Based on that I am sure I annoyed the hell out of a ton of people in my 1st 40 years or so. Not to say I haven’t been equally successful in this endeavor after 40,but prior to turning 40, I just seemed to have a real knack for being out there, big time. I had stumbled through a bunch of bad decisions and just plain stupid choices. For many reasons that person doesn’t exist anymore.

Before I go on, I should admit that I tend to have many of the same faults I often write about. Perhaps that is the ultimate joy of writing, the exorcism of ones thoughts and fears.

A few years back I was playing at new job. I say playing, since I was just trying it out for size and trying to see if it was really what I wanted to do for a living. Turned out it wasn’t.
In this new job I got to take people to lunch and so on, to convince folks that my new employer was the contractor for them. I got to play vendor golf, but in this case it was me telling the client what a great swing they had and how “shocked” I was that the shot that bounced of the sprinkler head and tree hadn’t ended up in the hole. In fact it really wasn’t all that different from my old job.

On one occasion I took and old acquaintance, (I would have probably used the term friend here, but at some point the writing on the wall is in neon), to lunch. After parading me through his new office and the really cute remarks about me being the vendor, (Vendor, see pays for everything and says how well you have done in Wikipedia), we headed off to lunch. My former colleague brought along a young engineer that reported to him. Albeit the chat was pleasant at 1st it soon turned to my desk is bigger then your desk. My “friend” took real joy in pointing out to his employee what a tragic joke my life was. He reveled in discussing my failed relationships and quizzed me about the number of these failures, since he had clearly not been able to keep count.
The rest of the lunch was run by autopilot. I vaguely recall picking up lunch as well as a few charity tickets to boot.
When I returned to my office I pondered the events. It occurred to me that I had a couple of choices here. The 1st of course being the logical one, merely smile and continue down the road of salesmanship, the 2nd being a deal breaker. I choice to write and email to my lunch buddy. In the note I readily admitted that I had made many bad choices in my personal life. I did not attempt to argue or defend any of these I had made. I then went on to point out that I had moved past those errors and would appreciate it if perhaps he might as well. I explained that I knew this could in fact be the end of a budding working relationship, I would hope that he might refrain from dragging me through memory lane in front of strangers.

Ever honk at someone in traffic when they have done something really dumb? They may have pulled out in front of you or run a stop sign. In so many cases when you alert the person to their driving expertise, they seem to have one reaction, drive really, really, fast.
The response from my email was pretty much that. After the apologetic note I never heard from my former friend again.

So there you go, as they say in the South, maybe you can never go home or re live your past, but never underestimate the abilities of others to do it for you.