Ten men cannot undo the damage of one man who throws a stone
January 19, 2020 | 4-minute read
The word on Oren Zahav* was that he was a super team player. As a Research division newbie, he organized a paintball party for his machine learning unit. He scored big during the game and racked up collateral praise as an engaging guy who worked hard and played hard.
My interaction with Oren was poisonous. I bumped into him my first day in the division and asked him, just some anonymous guy, “Do you know where the cafeteria is?” Oren motioned with his head like a mute oracle and walked past without a word. I was embarrassed: A blind nonagenarian with a suspended driver’s license would have seen the cafeteria off to my right. What can I say? When it comes to spatial relations, I bumble and stumble in the dark.
As it turned out, Oren’s office was two doors down from mine. I saw him every day, and every day he cast that same unseeing look at me. My request for directions had made me his village idiot.
Quite a few computer people commune better with machines than with human beings, and I rationalized Oren’s babyishness as an “on-the-spectrum” personality trait. I noticed though that with everyone else in the aisle, he lived up to his reputation as a righteous dude. He was at ease with the French and Russian researchers in his group as well as with his compatriot Israelis. I don’t think he resented women as a class of ignoramuses. He was friendly with Anat, a young software architect disparaged as mediocre by a couple of the gifted computer scientists I knew. Maybe something other than my bad sense of direction galled him. Did I remind him of his idiot mom?
The first time Oren mimicked me, I was eating by myself in the cafeteria. He was with a couple of colleagues, including Anat, and he pointed me out to them. You’re paranoid, I thought. I glanced about. It was indisputable. Oren was pointing at me. For the next two years, he kept up this playground-style tyranny of silence and derision.
Shortly after that first cafeteria incident, my manager Steve said to me, “If anybody ever gives you any trouble — if anybody ever hurts you — tell me. I will handle it.”
I was mortified that Oren’s mockery might have reached my manager.
A popular riddle asks: What belongs to you even though other people use it more than you do?
Your name.
In corporate life, your name is just about the most important thing you own. The Oren Zahavs of the world can wrest it from you and use it to ridicule you for the sheer fun of it. For them, cruelty is its own reward.
Brutes always know their own advantage. You need a plan in place to fight back. I wasn’t about to act like a nine-year-old and mock Oren to other people. I was cold when I had to be and coolly professional in my one or two e-mail interactions with him.
My father used to say, “Ten men cannot undo the damage done by one man who throws a stone.”
I can’t know if Oren’s mockery damaged my “good name.” I did get laid off a couple years into my Research job at the height of the credit default swap crisis, but I was invited back a year later as a contractor. By then Oren had left the company for a Ph.D. program in Haifa. Over the next nine years, I never encountered anybody else as petty as him.
I Googled him. In his spare time, Oren wrote poetry, some of it about God, some of it about romantic love. He photographed sunsets and adorable little green frogs. He liked Janis Joplin and Ender’s Game. He liked beer. He was married and had children. He was just one of several billion ordinary people on earth.
I found a more familiar incarnation of him in a recorded lecture he gave in a winsome Hebrew accent about some computing issue obscure to me. I had never actually heard him speak before. His lecture was congenial, and knowledgeable — until he misused the word “factoid” to mean “a small interesting fact” instead of “something that looks like a fact, could be a fact, but in fact is not a fact,” the word’s primary meaning.
I wanted to shout from the rooftops, “What an idiot!” But I took the high road. I mocked Oren ever so slightly to myself and moved on.
* Not his real name
