Life Preservers

Big Lies

July 18, 2021 at 12:27 pm Leave a comment

This one time? In marketing? I worked at a company that had a client who lied, a lot. But she had a lot of money to spend, so the powers-that-be never stood up to her.

My experience has been that, with most clients, you don’t have to fake respect, but we all understand the occasional necessity to tolerate bad behavior from a difficult customer. Still, this particular person pushed things out beyond the farthest reaches of professionalism and into a bat-shit alternative universe.

The tales I could tell about that particular workplace would scorch your hair and pulverize your humerus. To share the antics of this one client would take pages and pages, but this post isn’t about reliving a nightmare or venting about tough times. To make a long, hilarious, excruciating story short, one day, this client called up the owner of the company and said, “So-and-so did something bad.”

Now, I was in the room during the event in question, and, I promise you, this was a lie. It was not a misunderstanding or a point of view. This was a blatant and preposterous lie fabricated to manipulate other people.

There are times when even the best of leaders must blow some smoke into some pretty awful spots, but, if you are a decent human, you don’t inhale while you’re down there. You don’t applaud the lie. You don’t punish so-and-so. You don’t say, “Well, what actually occurred is irrelevant; if the big important client said it happened, it is now the truth.” (Which is what was said to me when I tried to defend so-and-so.)

On another occasion, the same client told my immediate supervisor that I was a poor writer because I used prepositional phrases. He summoned me to his office and presented the feedback. I started to laugh, expecting him to commiserate and help me figure out how we were going to work around such an idiotic complaint. But, he didn’t commiserate; he told me with furrowed brow that he was disappointed to learn that I was such an amateur copywriter and ordered me to stop using prepositional phrases or else.

These are ancient anecdotes, long-ago, dusty things. They bubbled up today, not as grudge or complaint but in a small aah! of revelation related to current events.

I will tell you something true. There are two reasons why people support a blatant lie:  (1) They are beholden to the liar or (2) They are too stupid to know better.

Entry filed under: Humor - Commentary. Tags: bad client, big lie, I like your shoes, jobs from hell.