Some years back, I had a colleague at work I really liked. He was generally a nice person, always seemed to have a smile on his face, and was one of the best people on my team. Oh, did I forget to mention, I was his supervisor? Well, we still got along as he was one of the few people on my team (of 16) that I didn’t have to supervise/; I’d give him some task(s) to complete and presto! he’d get everything done almost always without having to need my or anyone else’s help. If he did need help, he wasn’t too ashamed to ask for it. I mean, when they say 20% do the work? He was one of those 20%.

Every once in a while, I’d get called in by my boss for updates as to what the team was doing, even though he saw a formal weekly report. For some reson, he liked to sit and chat with his team (of supervisors). So it wasn’t unusual that one early afternoon I received a call to come down for a chat. It always annoyed me, because it seemed to occur when I was under a time crunch to get something done (it wasn’t) but hey, he’s the boss, right? After arriiving at the boss’s office, I was offered a cup of coffee and we begm the meeting either, you guessed it, a chat. About nothing in particular, but he was just probing, as he always did, to see if there were issues I wasn’t bringing forward If there had been, I would have, but not that day. then after a few minutes, he let me know why he called me into the office that afternoon. Based on my opening paragraph, can you guess?

Yes, that good guy, the person I not only considered a colleague, but a friend. The one I never had to worry about the quality of his work, had been complaining to my boss over several weeks about my treatment not ony of him, but other team members. Apparently, I was some sort of tyrant, without any sympathy for what the team went through on a daily basis to compelte tasks, nor did I ever offer to help anyone. Ever. Suffice to say, I was a little surprised ( well, that’s an understatement, I think) and at first I really didn’t know how to respond. Yes, I know about corporate politics and yes, I know that it’s not unusual for people to go around stabbing other workers they dislike.

Or as a way of attempting to get ahead in the company. If you want your bosses job, make sure they look bad to their superiors. If it’s done right, over time, you quietly slip into the position you want, without anyone knowing that it was you that knifed your way into that position. The deception didn’t work on. me and that was the real reason my supervisor called me down. He was at east pretty sure that a lot of these accusations were false, but had to go through the process because it was company protocol.

At the end of an hour, I knew for a fact that my job was safe and I was expplicitly told that if I wanted to fire this guy, I should go head a do it, explaining to him about the lies he’d attempt to foist on the company about me. I was angry, but i decided on a different path as i went back to my desk. The best way was to get him to quit. So I took my time, and over the next 3 months had made his life miserabl at work, explaining to him that he was the only one I could trust to get these tasks completed, on time. After a while, he figured out on his own that i knew what he had done. Two weeks later (giving notice) he was gone.

Why did I spend time on this story? The dame thing is going on, right now, online, between people that should be political allies, but have recently been wrenched apart by accusations flying to and fro over what will eventually become a nonevent in everyone’s life. Its too bad that people are wiling to publicly throw others under the bus that they recently called friend, and accuse them of all kinds of awful, heinous statements that well, they didn’t actully make and in this case, since it’s all on video, in the public, easy to verify.

The reason this is going on? I think there’s a tinge of jealousy because some of these accused re clearly on the ride, in the public eye, and they seem to have a larger overall following than the ones making the accusations. And tose accusers cant reasonably expect not to be prodded and poked like they’ve attempted others, can they? If there’s going to be an online war of words, make sure your words about your opposition land with effect and not as duds in the dirt. for the rest of us, before we decide to take one side or the other,let’s make sure we know what we’re talking about and not taking someone else’s word for the truth. People have their own agendas. Everyone does. there are no angels in these battles, only those that have lost, and those that have lost more.