If you're like me, you sometimes google people out of boredom. Today I googled a flag instructor I worked with a long time ago. I hired him back in 1996 or so... when I was at my last school. He was a talented guy, but he turned out to be a drug addict and a pathological liar. He was always trying to borrow money, and he tried to squeeze more pay out of me than we had agreed upon. Our working relationship ended badly, to say the least. Two years after I threw him out of my office, he was still using me as a reference. He even put me down as an "current employer" on a couple of applications. My last contact with him was an angry phone message where he threatened to sue me for slander.(1) I didn't worry about it. I knew that whatever money he managed to scrape up usually went up his nose, so the chances of him actually hiring a lawyer were slim (not that he had a case.)
I last heard news of him from a mutual friend, just before I moved and got married. It sounded as if he had been getting worse... and I remember thinking that it wouldn't be long before he wound up dead or in jail.
Well, today I found an obituary for him. He died back in 2005... "after a long illness." 28 years old. He lived for less than a decade after I saw him last. Wow... I wasn't even married yet at 28. (2) So I scrape up what ever I can find in the bottom of my psyche that resmbles "pity" or "sympathy" and offer it up silently. There's not much, but it's there.
1) I told a car dealership that he had not been working for me for three years, as he had claimed. They had trouble finding me. He had put down the right name, but a fake phone number.
2) I also wasn't a coke addict on the run from a horde of debt collectors.
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