Learning to Hate Someone

I take hating someone else very seriously.  By that I don't mean to say that I enjoy it or that it's a hobby for me.  Just the opposite.  It's an unpleasant task that I'd rather not do, but I'm sorry to report that I've done it anyway.  To me, hating someone else is a last resort.  It's what you do after you've tried everything you can possibly do to explain their existence in the same world as you.  It is one of the worst feelings in the world and I hope you never have to do it.  

Hate is one of the strongest emotions we as humans can experience.  It is unpleasant and not satisfying in any way.  Now I'm not talking about just mentioning to a friend that you hate someone while you're discussing a local band, a Facebook post, or your boss.  That's dislike or disapproval, but it's not real hate.  Real hate is actually wishing that they didn't exist.  Real hate can escalate into deplorable actions if it's not controlled by moral values and common sense.  Thankfully, I've never let mine escalate that far and my brain would hopefully not let me take any of these actions.

I believe our brains need to somehow organize all of the information passing through them each day.  By organizing and categorizing, the brain builds memories, knowledge, and emotional bonds.  I think that when a brain has too much unpleasant information relating to a person, place, or thing it becomes unable to categorize this unpleasantness and just parks the information in a category called "things I hate."  For most people the number of things parked in this category is very small.  Some lucky people go through life without ever using this category at all.  Some people figure out a way to move items out of this category and put them into a category called "things I don't like."  Some unfortunate people can't tolerate having anything in this category and spend a lot of their time trying to move things out of it by removing the information stored there out of their lives entirely.

Throughout the course of my life I've only really hated one person.  True story.  Sure, I have a number of people and things in my "things I don't like" category (scallops, cucumbers, egocentric presidents, and of course menudo), but there's only one item in the "things I hate" category.  To understand why he's there, you have to understand how he earned his place there.

In the mid 1980's I was lucky enough to land a job at one of Omaha's best country clubs as a Sous Chef.  I was excited about it because I was going to work for one of the best chefs in the midwest.  If you're thinking that "good chef" and "midwest" shouldn't be used in the same sentence, you're wrong.  We have a vibrant, innovative, and rapidly growing food scene here.  When I started working at the club there were more restaurants per capita than in any other city in America.  I worked there happily for about a year before the Executive Chef decided to leave and go to an exclusive private club located on the top floor of an office building downtown.  This restaurant was where Omaha's elite dined.  The country club had a very wealthy and influential membership, but even most wealthy and influential of these people didn't qualify for membership at the chef's new place.  After he left, I acted as Executive Chef at the country club while they searched for a new chef.  I considered trying to get the job, but I just wasn't ready for that kind of position yet.

This is where the hate part of the story begins.  The club's General Manager hired a Executive Chef from an exclusive country club in Pennsylvania and moved him and his family to Omaha.  His name was Nabil.  He was from Egypt and we were all told that he had impressive credentials, although all we really knew for sure was that the GM had worked with him somewhere in the past.  I had worked with chefs from other countries in the past and I knew that there were cultural differences that we should be aware of.  Sometimes someone from another culture does something that you think is mean or disrespectful, but they mean no harm.  The reverse is also true.  It takes a little time to figure out all of these things, but in the end we are basically all the same and mean no harm.  Except for this guy.  He was toxic.

Eager to establish his authority as Executive Chef, he immediately changed all the salaried employees' work schedules to "6:00AM until I say that you can leave" for seven days a week.  If we wanted a day off we would need to ask him ahead of time.  Even if he granted our request, it was subject to change without notice.  There were several times where I had asked for a day off and he approved my request.  Then, at 9:00AM on my day off I'd receive a phone call asking why I wasn't at work and that, if I wanted to keep my job, I had better get to the club immediately.  The day chef, banquet chef and myself all had young families, so this was a big problem for us.  

The quality of food began to suffer.  We were not allowed to purchase quality ingredients anymore.  No fresh fish, no quality meats, bargain basement produce, and very little inventory to work with.  We couldn't even order staples like salt and pepper, so we bought our own and brought them to work hidden in our knife rolls.  Dairy was rationed.  We made a lot of French food, so the shortage of heavy cream and butter alone crippled our production.  Our signature recipes were changed.  The items that the club had been known for were removed from the menu or altered so they no longer resembled the things our customers had loved for many years.

There were a number of times when we didn't have the basic ingredients to prepare for banquets scheduled for the day.  Nabil's solution was to simply serve them something else.  I remember one function for about 50 people where the event's sponsor had made it clear to us that he wanted a certain cut of steak and a small cold water lobster tail.  He contacted the kitchen several times to make sure we were procuring the best steaks available and that the lobster tails were cold water tails instead of commodity lobster tails like you get at Red Lobster.  He kept telling us that price was no object.  He wanted the best of everything.

On the morning of the event we still did not have any lobster or steaks in the building.  I had asked Nabil about it on the previous two days and he assured me that he was handling it.  I went to his office and asked him again.  He replied with "What do you need them for?  How do you expect me to get steak and lobster on such short notice?"  I wanted to say "It's your fucking job, you incompetent douche-nozzle," but I held my tongue and apologized for interrupting him.  He said that he was supposed to meet his friend Bashir at Perkins for tea and now I had ruined it for him because I wasn't doing my job and he would have to spend that time procuring steak and lobster.

By 4:00 we still hadn't seen any steak or lobster arrive, so I asked him again.  He responded with an angry tirade about being the only person who ever did any work and rushed off to the golfer's grill downstairs.  After about half an hour he came back with a large tray of hamburger patties and 3 boxes of frozen breaded shrimp.  "Here.  You will serve them this.  And make sure this doesn't happen again or you will not work here any more."  He Disappeared back into his office upstairs.

You may not fully understand the hierarchy in a professional kitchen, so I'll sum it up as briefly as I can.  The Executive Chef is the undisputed boss.  You absolutely MUST do whatever he/she tells you.  There is no other option.  Period.  The Executive Chef tells his Sous Chefs and Banquet Chefs what he want done and they make sure it is done.  As a Sous Chef you have to make sure it gets done no matter what the cost or level of effort.  And it is not your place to question the Executive Chef on anything.  Ever.  No exceptions.  That's pretty much how it goes down every day in almost every kitchen.

So we prepared the items he told us to prepared and everyone, including the General Manager, watched in horror as it was all taken out to the tables.  The general Manager and service staff understood the kitchen hierarchy and that we just didn't have any other choice but to serve what Nabil told us to serve.  We were not held responsible.  

But there were repercussions.  The club member sponsoring the event went ballistic, and with good reason.  He had gone to great lengths to make sure we were planing on serving a spectacular meal and we didn't do it.  And who wants to pay $95 per plate for something you can get at the Long John Silver's drive-thru for $3.49?  We had embarrassed the club member in front of 50 of his closest friends.  The next morning the member was waiting in the General Manager's office with a board member when the GM arrived at work.  The door was immediately closed and remained closed for over an hour.  Then Nabil was summoned and the door remain closed for another hour.  This time angry voices and uncontrolled screaming could be heard form outside the door.

Afterwards, Nabil immediately called a mandatory meeting for 2:00 that afternoon.  Everyone including those who had the day off were required to attend or be fired.  When the meeting started, Nabil immediately began screaming at us about how incompetent we were.  We were told that the only reason we had jobs was because of him.  He told us that we had better shape up or we would be fired.  He did this for about an hour, but never told us what we had done wrong or how we need to to "shape up."  It was just an angry, incoherent rant.  At several times during his tantrum, he pointed his index finger at his chest and screamed "I am the best!  You have no idea how good I am!  You are lucky to be working for me and don't forget it!"

It was during that day that I realized three things:

First, he could control what we did every day, but he couldn't control what we were thinking.  This thought was somehow comforting.

Second, I realized that I was sitting ion the front row and that my chef's coat was wet from minute droplets of his saliva that he had been spitting all over us in his rage.

Third, I realized that I truly hated this man.  Not dislike, but true hate.

The Nabil situation went on for a long time after that.  There were more screwed up banquets, more meetings behind closed doors, more mandatory rage sessions for us, and every day his grip over all of us became more intense and stifling.  All creativity and joy in our work was forcefully and completely drained from us.  Any time we were seen talking to another employee we were questioned at length about the subject of our conversation.  More arabic-speaking kitchen staff members were hired and Nabil spoke to them in Arabic when he didn't want the rest of us to understand what they were talking about.  We suspected that they were placed in the kitchen to keep an eye on us when he wasn't around, which was most of the time.  We tested this theory by saying a few things in front of them that we knew Nabil would want to hear and then seeing if the information was passed back to him.  Our suspicions were proved to be entirely correct.

Nabil was Egyptian, but he had an American wife.  They had been married about 10 years and had somehow managed to have 12 children together.  During the birth of their last child, there were some complications and they were told she could not bear any more children.  Nabil was not happy about this and he began to openly telling everyone that he was looking for a new wife because he was "done with this one" since she could no longer bear any more children.  What a piece of shit.

In order to pave the way for dumping his current wife and starting to look for a new one, he packed up all 12 children one night and took them to stay with his family in Egypt.  He was gone three weeks.  He had not told anyone, including the General Manager, that he was going, yet he was somehow allowed to keep his job.  His wife had no way of retrieving her children and had not even had a chance to say goodbye to them.  She just woke up one morning and everyone was gone.  According to Nabil it was her fault and he was protecting his children.

Nabil made several more trips to Egypt during his first six months at the club and we realized that he had spent more time in Egypt than he had spent at his job.  And he was paid for all of it.  Each time he returned we were all immediately summoned to another mandatory meeting and berated again just like I described earlier.  By now we all knew he was the pure embodiment of evil.  I don't mean that sarcastically, either.

After almost a year of this, I just couldn't take any more and resigned during one of his trips to Egypt.  I had no place to go, but even being unemployed was better than working for him for one more minute.  Everyone at the club, including the General Manager who had hired Nabil, understood completely and supported my decision.  It was obvious that the GM regretted his hiring decision and had expresses it several times.

What does all this have to do with hate?  I told you all of that because of the impact it has had on the rest of my life.  Even after 32 years I still despise that man like no other and that, my friends, is true hatred.  It's the kind of hate where if you saw him on the side of the road next to a broken down car in the middle of nowhere with his thumb out asking for a ride, you would have to make a decision.  The decision wouldn't be whether or not to stop and give him a ride.  The decision would be whether or not to swerve over and hit him with your car going 70 miles per hour.  I know I hate that man because I'm not completely sure I would just keep driving past and ignore him.

I'm happy to say that Nabil is the only person I've encountered in my life that I truly hate.  I lost track of Nabil a long time ago.  The last I heard of him was that he had been travelling in Kuwait on an American passport at the start of the first gulf war, so karma may have taken care of things for me when the Iraquis invaded.  I hope you are one of the people who is lucky enough to never have to hate someone during your lifetime.  It would be way better that way.