27. [deleted]

My brother was in Bosnia (I believe) before 9/11 and the invasion of Afghanistan, and he told me they came up on a crater that was filled with men, women, and children’s bodies who had been lined up and executed.

28. devoirz

When I was young, I saw a little girl get run over by a car, the person fled the scene, but I think they caught him hours later; many saw his license plate.

29. Darth_Sithis

A couple of jobs ago I worked with two of the best programmers I’ve ever met, call them A and B. Our boss (C) was also a programmer and he was good, but not as good as A and B. What C was good at was office politics.

A was one of those guys out of The Mythical Man-Month who could do 20x the work of a normal programmer. Guy should’ve been working for Google. He also saw himself as being this socially awkward failure but he really wasn’t that socially inept-I’d certainly met worse. He just loved programming. B was more socially awkward and not as good at coding, but he had UI design skills. He also had the “I’m just a nerd” thing going on.

Anyway, at my first Christmas party with this company I got drunk with C and he told me that he would be nowhere without A and B. They had all worked together elsewhere before and A and C went to high school together. This is when I started paying attention.
C would make constant subtle jabs at A and B’s social awkwardness, to reinforce their low self-esteem. Stuff like agreeing with and extending their self-deprecating jokes in a way that sounded funny at first but that you got to thinking about later. This was done in order to keep them from developing enough confidence to take their skills elsewhere.

When C realized I had figured his game out, he started coming after me. He took my main project away from me to take credit for it. This was a new business line that was shaky when I started, but I worked hard on it to make the software work, and it had stabilized – right when all the other lines of business at this company started going south.

C needed to have a success on his plate, because he was about to get our VP fired. He got this done by kissing the asses of all of the VP’s peers and above, while refusing to allow A and B (or myself) to work on the VP’s pet project, which we could have saved. The project crashed and lost a few $million and VP was out the door, and hey, everyone knows C now and knows he’s a smart guy so let’s make him the VP.

When A and B started grousing about longer hours, he bought them all kinds of stuff – a huge grill, new PCs, whatever they wanted. He protected them at all costs while hanging the rest of us out. I left about 6 months after this.

The most evil part was what he did to A and B. They were too socially unskilled to realize they were being manipulated. They thought C was actually their friend, but guys like him don’t have friends, they have tools.

Not exactly rape and kidnap but it’s the most calculating shit I’ve seen since high school.