[Rain Man]

It's not a particularly funny story, but before I started my company I worked at a small consulting firm. They had a Christmas party at the house of one of the senior people. I had a new intern assigned to me, and I hadn't had any time to get to know her. I ended up sitting next to her and her husband-to-be at dinner.

We were making small talk, and I found out that the guy was a college student. I asked what degree he was pursuing, and he said "philosophy". I nodded politely, and the guy suddenly went off on me. In a loud mocking voice, he said, "I saw that look you gave me! Ooooh, philosophy major! He'll never get a job! Useless degree! Well, yes! Yes! I'm a philosophy major and I don't care what you think!" On and on and on. I had done nothing but politely nod.

I had no opinion at all about the guy until that moment. But I acquired an instant dislike for him. He was just a jerk.

So now I had this intern, and my opinion of her was not very high because it would take a really stupid woman to be with this guy. Later, she commented on how clever he was because he liked to make racist comments to news articles "just to make people mad". She seemed to think that that was a sign of an advanced sense of humor. So my opinion went down another notch.

It turned out that this woman was completely incompetent at her job, too, and unethical to boot. She also had an incredibly annoying personality. I was responsible for her at the time but didn't have the authority to fire her, so I was stuck with her until I eventually quit.

Twenty years later, she's still floating around in my industry in different jobs and still an idiot. A few years back, a client came to me to take over a project that was in progress, and they told me that "they were tired of the consultant making screwups". That's an unusually frank thing to hear from a client, and when they sent me the files to clean up the mess, guess whose signature was on the work?

I don't hate the woman because she doesn't warrant that level of passion. She's just the human equivalent of walking through a spider web. When you encounter her you make a disgusted face and swat her away.