Have you ever met someone who represents everything you hate
about a person?
I recently have and had to spend 78 days on a film production
crew with him orbiting around me like a malaria-carrying mosquito. I kept swatting at him to make him disappear, but
he just wouldn’t leave. He got on my last fucking nerve with his constant condescension,
his overblown ego, his complete disrespect for his coworkers, and most importantly,
his complete incompetence at his producing job.
I was certainly not the only one who felt this way. Everyone
who came in contact with him eventually hated him. By the time the director yelled
“It’s a wrap!” many had already abandoned the production, with one person
saying, “I choose sanity over employment.”
For me, it started the first week when he would constantly badger
me with stupid questions, asking for cell phone numbers when he already had them,
repeating the same questions over and over expecting different answers, and interrupting
everyone’s conversation because he was convinced that he was more important.
When we first started getting lunch, he refused to eat with
the plastic utensils sent by the restaurant. He demanded expensive silverware and
made one of the crew purchase a set just for him. And every day when lunch arrived, he would demand his silverware. It was beneath him to go to the kitchen
and get it himself.
One day the silverware disappeared. I won’t admit to
anything, but it ended up in the dumpster in my apartment garage. Oops.
For lunch, he always demanded organic food with a side of
fresh fruit.
I remember clearly the day he pitched a fit when he tasted
his fruit and said it wasn’t good fruit, that it tasted like canned fruit from
Costco. Well... how did he know what canned Costco fruit tastes like? That’s
when I knew at home he eats canned Costco fruit (with a side of Spam).
I was hoping he’d choke on a pineapple piece, so I wouldn’t have
to perform the Heimlich Maneuver.
Then there was the day he tossed his receipts at us to
submit to accounting for reimbursement. There were receipts for manicures,
pedicures, late-night cocktails, and condoms. Yes, condoms. He wanted the
production to pay for his condoms. My immediate reaction was “who the hell
would fuck him?”
The final straw for me was the chaotic day before we started
shooting when he kept yelling out my name. When I finally looked his way he said,
“Michael, get me a Post-it.” I immediately thought to myself, “Funny the people
you meet when you don’t have a gun!”
After that, I rarely answered his emails or his phone calls,
though one time I accidentally touched my phone accepting his call and mumbled, “Oh
damn, it’s that asshole Pierre” before realizing I had answered it and immediately
hung up. He never called me again.
In all my years working on various projects, I’ve never been
so repulsed by someone as I was by him.
I took the position because I thought it would be an opportunity.
Little did I know it was an opportunity to learn what not to do.... and yikes, what
an experience it was!
As for Pierre, he’s somewhere in New York bullying his way
onto another production, surely to be hated by a whole new crew.
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