Unforgiven

When I was in high school I was friends with a girl named Katie (OK, not strictly true: I was friends with several girls named Katie. That’s just the way the naming demographics broke in my class.) This particular Katie was taller than me, not by much, which was rare considering that at 14 I was already 5′ 7″, blonde, and glamorous in that slightly adventurous, whiff-of-danger sort of way that for some reason I find appealing.

I’m not quite sure how we ended up lab partners in whatever class it was we had together that fall – Intro to Computers I think (yes, I am that old) – but during that year we became “friends” and whether it was boasting or confiding Katie told me a lot about her social life which included the fact that she’d lost her virginity to her 17 year-old boyfriend over the summer. Given that she was 14 just like me and didn’t think this event was a big deal she seemed so wild, so grown up.

And in my middle class baby-dykeness I was completely and utterly smitten, not that I would have admitted I had a crush on this girl who was ostensibly my friend. No, I just felt all warm and fuzzy inside and acted like a complete dope when she was around. So that January after being invited over for a Superbowl party with boys in whom I hadn’t the slightest iota of interest I called her house to chat with her mom about what would be a good birthday gift for her. And for a week afterward whenever I said hi to her in the halls she completely ignored me. It was like I didn’t exist. After about a week of this I finally asked her what exactly she was angry at me for. She informed me in a voice that would have dripped icicles if tones of voice were capable of such things that I’d been rude to her mother when I’d called.

Having been raised to be polite to my elders this struck me doubly hard as I stood there frantically reviewing the phone conversation in my head. I didn’t think I’d been rude, overly friendly perhaps, but not rude. I recall having to work not to barf as I asked her to convey my apologies to her mother for me, and that I’d hope she’d accept mine to her as well. She sort of nodded as I recall, slammed her locker, and went off. And for the next two weeks she still didn’t speak to me. And two weeks after that. And another two weeks.

Sometime around week three of the silent treatment I decided that I really didn’t need her as a friend, that someone who would treat me like that wasn’t worth my time. By the time she determined I’d been punished enough I was done with her. Yes, I was polite to her as she tried to renew our friendship but it was clear that we weren’t really friends any more. Even then I had a certain intellectual distance from the experience as she tried to get close to me again after freezing me out and she realized that it wasn’t going to work.

I suppose I eventually forgave her for the way she treated me; we were polite to each other all through the rest of high school even though she tracked academically differently than I did (I was the smart kid) and we didn’t really run in the same circles.

But did I really forgive her or was it just that I found a way to reconcile my image of her with her behavior? And how far does someone have to go to not merit forgiveness?

This question comes up for me now for a number of reasons but the most pointed one is the fact that the professional community in which I work is incredibly small in the place in which I live and I’ve recently been contacted by someone, we’ll call him Mr. Designer (because even though his parents were silly enough to grace him with the two of the necessary initials they were smart enough not to give him the middle name Oscar), who was less than honest in his dealings with me as an employee.

I can forgive the fact that Mr. Designer was a bad people manager. I’m not such a hot people manager myself; people always have needs and they’re never forthcoming about them even if asked directly so you have to suss them out and not getting their needs met often gets in the way of getting the work done. Managing staff can be a real pain in the ass.

It was also the dot com era which meant we worked crazy hours on projects that often never saw launch. My initial project work for this company was actually a subcontract to work on a high profile, multimillion dollar site that has been held up as an example of all that was wrong with how business malfunctioned during that era…$8M dollars for a web site that never debuted. The long hours, the frustration of never seeing your work come to fruition, the strange working conditions (seven of us crammed into a basement in a house in Northern Virginia) were all part of the times.

In order to get a contract, Mr. Designer would often agree to schedules that were ridiculously short, ones that if we had a full slate of work were impossible to meet and if we didn’t have a full slate of work he’d simply throw two or three people on the project to get it done. He created a near constant sense of panic, a low grade adrenaline drip that kept us all as edgy as wiener dogs knocking back double shots of espresso.

But after sometimes weeks of sitting around because there wasn’t really enough work, and after getting shit blown at me for showing up after 9am on days when it snowed in a city where even the mention of the dreaded s-word in the previous night’s weather forecast is enough to clear grocery store shelves of bread, toilet paper, milk, and kitty litter, I found another job. It wasn’t until later that I realized the truth nature of his duplicity.

Every year the Social Security Administration sends me an estimated benefits form. It hopefully declares that X amount will be my monthly benefits assuming a) my income continues to trend upward based on some formula that was probably developed in the 1940s, and b) the baby boomers don’t clean out the social security trust fund. And every year I check to make sure that they’ve recorded the previous year’s income correctly.

It’s not well known but FICA, which comes out of your check every time you get paid, isn’t due to the government every two weeks or bi-monthly. No, FICA payments go to the Fed quarterly. And the oldest tax dodge in the book for a business with irregular cash flow is to take the FICA out of the employees’ checks, use that money to cover bills or shortfalls, and then make the payment up later out of accounts receivable. It’s illegal and it’s done every single day. And it only works if you actually make up the payments.

My social security earnings statement for the fiscal year after I left Mr. Designer’s employment reflected only the monies I’d been paid by my previous employer yet I paid taxes on and had W-2 statements reflecting significantly higher income. All this means that Mr. Designer took my money, used it for business purposes, and then never sent it to the government.

So did he think I wouldn’t check or perhaps wouldn’t notice that my income had been under reported to the Social Security Administration but tens of thousands of dollars?

Back when I was working for The Treehuggers, who weren’t so good with money themselves, Mr. Designer discovered we had a common acquaintance who gave out my work number without asking me. I ignored his calls and didn’t feel but the slightest twinge. But now with the advent of social networking, Mr. Designer is back wanting to link to me and “get back in touch.”

Even though SSA took my W2s as proof of income and corrected my account, essentially Mr. Designer tried to defraud me of my earned wages one of the sins, my mother repeatedly informs me, that cries out for vengeance. The question becomes: what does someone have to do, how big does a transgression have to be, in order for someone to remain unforgiven?

Do you draw the line at damage done? Do you draw it at initial impact? Or maybe it isn’t about the actual effects of the action or transgression at all. Maybe it’s about the circumstances under which the deed was done (which is worse: to have someone do something that hurts you when that person knows because you’ve told them it will hurt your feelings or to have someone act out of self-interest with no regard for how it affects you?)

Looked at from another perspective, maybe it isn’t about forgiveness at all. Resentment and anger bind you to someone almost more strongly than love ever possibly could. Maybe it’s really about boundaries. I don’t really resent Mr. Designer for what he did but I certainly don’t want him back in my life. So maybe I’m still applying the lesson I learned when I was 14. That still doesn’t answer the question I sat down here to ponder: do I let him LinkIn or not?