Throwaway because my asshole cousin is a redditor as well. I should note that I often pitch in and help at my husband’s small company if needed, and sometimes study in his office, hence my involvement.
My husband has been a mentor to my cousin for a number of years. It started when Cousin became interested in music. Husband is an accomplished musician and the two of them bonded over the subject.
When cousin graduated high school and decided to study music, my husband gifted him an expensive musical instrument that his father had gifted him as a teenager. It was very touching and tears were shed among the family.
Cousin has a natural proclivity for the industry my husband works in, too. My husband arranged for his company to hire Cousin casually while he studied. Cousin lives in another state, but husband arranged for him to work remotely, with flexible hours, at graduate-level pay.
Cousin had several complaints made about his brashness, arrogance and rudeness. He has self-diagnosed with Autism so his rudeness was reprimanded but overall he got away with it. The thing that annoyed me is that while he is acknowledged to be very good at his job, he often wrongly assumed seniority over his coworkers, all of whom are graduates in the field which he has never studied.
He travelled down for a month in June to spend time in the office, and one afternoon I took him shopping for video games and gave him some cash to help with transport, since he was without a car. Our shopping trip ended poorly though, with no video games purchased, when he called me “white trash” because I mentioned my love of handbags.
He abruptly resigned by email two weeks ago. His wording was a copy/paste of the briefest resignation letter template on google. He ignored all my husband’s calls to find out what was going on.
I had a strange feeling and asked my husband to cut off his access from the system and see what he’d been up to. Turns out he’d been savagely disrespectful about my husband to other employees in Hangouts, made borderline racist comments about another employee’s accent and generally awful comments about other employees’ competence. When we cut his access off, he tried and failed to hack into the owner’s login and another employee’s.
We discovered he solicited an ex-employee for contract work in July has been double-jobbing for that person, who we were already aware was trying to go into direct competition with my husband’s company. Data security is obviously a concern.
Finally, he answered the phone and off-handedly apologised to my husband for not picking his up his calls. He lied and said he hadn’t spoken to the ex-employee for over a year.
My husband is refusing to take legal action, saying it would be awful to “drag a wee boy down to (our state) to face court” and that he can’t stomach doing that to a family member. He’ll swear at him on the phone but he won’t sue the little bastard.
The company owner is shocked and hurt. He had been a dear friend for years and a mentor to my husband, but my sense is that there is a distance growing between them since this incident. When I visit the office I can feel tension that wasn’t there before.
I am expecting to see Cousin’s branch of the family at Christmas and frankly I don’t think I’ll be able to keep my temper. The little creep has hurt us and possibly damaged my husband’s career.
I need advice on what to do, given that my husband is so infuriatingly intractable about legal action and I am sick with rage. Should I call Cousin’s parents? Send a vitriolic email to Cousin? I am very close to Cousin’s older brother and we are having dinner tomorrow night, but so far I have not wanted to involve him - am I wrong? This hurt and anger is really eating me up.
TL;DR: we learned the hard way never to do business with family and now I’m wondering how to remain family with someone I absolutely hate.
Submitted October 30, 2019 at 03:10AM by TerribleEfficiency0 https://ift.tt/2WqcBPO
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