I can tell by the sudden burst of enthusiasm and the link passing to his wife that Little Shiva is quite excited at present. Presumably he thinks this year’s disaster somehow justifies what he did to me last year.
Sorry to disappoint, Little Shiva, but I pieced together what you did from the information I was given by your manager, your wife and from finding out that you were married in the first place via companies house. If anything is missing or incorrect you have ample opportunity to apologize or correct your error. As far as I know you are just a coward that did what your incredibly unattractive and nasty gym pal told you to do. It wouldn’t have taken you very long to say you were married and then leave me the fuck alone. That is not what you did. I was not the one doing the staring, brat.
This year, by comparison, here is what happened, if you require dates they are mostly listed on the blog:
End of December the ‘lovely, effusive man’ knocks at my car window, introduces himself and tells me where his shop is. I gave him a business card and forgot about it, as experience tells me if people cannot be bothered looking you up online, they are just impulse passers-by and it is pretty meaningless.
End of January I bump into him again whilst buying coffee. He is irritated that I have not been into his shop.
It turns out he has a wife and child at home, however he repeatedly says he is unhappy and they are getting divorced. He also says he is polygamous and has just lost his second wife as she is a nutter who had made a variety of horrible accusations about him. He indicates that he is very much in love with the nutter anyway.
This is like a red rag to a bull, I have major issues with false accusations, particularly leveled at men as this happened to another friend of mine who proceeded to put me in hospital as a rehearsal for getting to the culprit and doing the same thing to her. I do not like shit like this.
Anyway I refuse to befriend and con her into returning, which is apparently what he wanted me to do, however in the course of conversation it turns out that he has never actually said anything nice to her, and his attempts to get her back have consisted of threatening her, getting other people to threaten her, discussing whether she can be bribed etc. He claims that a third party has hacked into his facebook and phone and has manipulated the situation, which I doubt. He also claims that a variety of passing strangers that he and this woman have insulted have become involved and also interfered. This I also doubt, since the only thing this dude is good at is messing with mobile phones.
Anyway he is quite a coarse speaker, and insults you a lot, but it is usually quite jovial at first, so we get into a kind of insult competition, and as I am fairly sick of hearing how marvellous this glorious yet apparently dishonest madonna is, I respond every time he mentions her with ‘oh, the whore?’
This meets with some success, as I no longer have to listen to hours and hours of drivel about her every time I go in to either mind his shop for him or work on the oil can. He appears to have four distinct personalities, the Prince of Libya, who is an obnoxious 15 year old, the geezer, who is a ned in his late 20s, the local worthy, who seems to be a depressed man in his 50s, and a whinging child. These changes are not only in attitude, he actually looks physically different depending on which character he is in.
Once he believes the oil can to be finished, he buys a new hat, which turns out to be significant.
Wearing his new hat, along with a jaunty scarf he announces that he is an artist, that everything I have done for him is shite, and that he expects me to come in, finish it and do some more.
My reply is no thanks, I was doing this for a friend. You are not a friend, therefore I will not be doing anything else for you.
The morning after Christchurch, he screams in front of his friend that he is done being respectful before screaming at me to stand in a corner so he can shout at me. This is because he does not know anything about resin work and objects to me knowing about it. I say no thanks and leave the shop. He has since repeatedly said that this was evidence of me ‘going crazy.’
I went into the shop I think once after that, about two months ago, and within ten minutes of me giving him a list of things he still needs to do to complete his cafe, with his friend agreeing with me as I did so, he indicated that again I was supposed to do whatever he said and nothing else.
I said no, that was not acceptable to me and that I was too angry to remain in his company as he evidently couldn’t either listen or appreciate that I know a whole lot more about catering, artwork, building etc than he does.
I have not seen him in person since. He tried to get me to return to the shop several times. I said no, on the grounds of several very unpleasant emails and phone calls. One of the calls was an hour and a half of him shouting at my cat, not apparently noticing that I was not on the call at all. The threats escalated from threats of malicious gossip to an actual death threat in the form of asking for my last words.
I am not sure what I am supposed to make of all this. He has been making a variety of claims about me, none of which are accurate. He has tried to make out that this is about money, that I am insane, that I apparently wanted to sleep with him, although this was sorted out very quickly when it transpired he had a wife – I am not particularly interested in married people as previously indicated.
I was just there, as far as I know, to help a dude that was very upset by his second polygamous wife leaving him and making accusations whilst producing what would have been a functional and nice artwork table.
He made quite a variety of assumptions, from the beginning when he seemed to think that I was some sort of vagrant who would want a job in his ganghut cafe, to the end where he seemed to be mistaking me for his lunatic ex.
All along the line he tried to make me responsible for his behaviour. He claims this is normal where he comes from. By the end, he demanded that I go into the cafe and when I said no, was immediately threatening me with the police, malicious gossip, legal attacks, which are the most frightening of all, and some more subtle threats of violence from his new girlfriend, who from what he is saying is some sort of super skilled sumo wrestler (at least she would have to be to physically threaten somebody of my stature, presumably)
Anyway, that is the story. Nothing at all like your stupid behaviour at work, little Shiva.
I am now unsure what to do, because I do not think it is safe to do nothing.
Chair is looking nice. Long way to go.