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Welcome to Stuff I Learned Yesterday. My name is Darrell Darnell, my favorite Star Wars character is Han Solo, and I believe if you aren’t learning, you aren’t living. In today’s episode of Stuff I Learned Yesterday I share a lesson I learned by going to the dark side.
Today’s Fun Fact of the Day is: You might already know that John Williams won an Oscar for the Star Wars soundtrack, but did you also know that the American Film Institute later named it the greatest film score of all time?
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What I Learned Yesterday:
I spent nearly 19 years working for a bookstore chain. You can imagine the number of people that I worked with during that time. Fortunately, most of them were really great. I spent just over half of those years working on the frontline of the chain at several of our stores.
Like many companies, there was a disconnect between those that worked in the stores, and those that worked at the corporate office. While I worked at the store, it was pretty common to hear comments from my co-workers about how clueless the corporate people were. In fact, when I eventually got a job at the corporate office, one of my co-workers at the store gave me the board game Clue as a going away present, so that I would never find myself clueless at my new job at the corporate office.
Once I started working at the corporate office, I had a better understanding of why and how the company made the decisions. It was much easier to see the big picture and grasp a better understanding of the company as a whole when my viewpoint wasn’t isolated to a single retail location.
When I got fired from my corporate position 18 months later and got reassigned back to a retail store, I tried to take my new insight with me. I tried to help my co-workers see things from the corporate perspective, but my efforts didn’t always work.
In fact, I had one co-worker, let’s call him Bob, that really struggled at times to understand the the logic behind the decisions of the corporate office. Now I’m not going to try and make it sound like the corporate office always got things right, because that’s just not true. But Bob was really jaded. Bob was so jaded that he often referred to the corporate office as the evil empire. The corporate office was the Death Star. The president of the company was Darth Vader, and the CEO was The Emperor.
Bob was also a bit paranoid. By the time I was reassigned to work at Bob’s store, I had worked alongside employees at over 15 different stores in the chain. I think Bob thought that his Star Wars comparisons were a unique idea. I assure you that Bob was not nearly the first person I had heard assign those terms to the corporate office and those who worked there. However, Bob might have been the most vocal with the comparisons.
Bob knew that I still had a lot of connections at the corporate office and was kind of nervous about calling them names while I was around. On more than one occasion Bob made me promise to keep his name calling a secret. I agreed.
One day the company president, or shall I say, Darth Vader came to visit. On that particular day, he was there specifically to see me. He and I had arranged to meet before the store opened so we could discuss a new job opportunity for me. Vader and I hadn’t yet started our meeting and we were standing in the middle area of the store talking.
Bob, not realizing that Vader was in the store, got onto the store intercom and asked for some assistance with getting rid of some crickets that had made their way into Bob’s department overnight. Vader looked at me with a grin. He was up to the challenge of eradicating the pests. As Vader and I began making our way to the infested area of the store Vader began humming the Imperial March. It was all I could do to restrain my laughter. Maybe the president of the company really was Darth Vader.
He and I got rid of the crickets and went on to have our scheduled meeting. He soon offered me the position of overseeing the development of the new e-commerce division of the company, and he became my immediate supervisor.
Over the next 7 years, I worked with him and we developed a really great relationship. He had a great sense of humor and was very personable. While he took his job very seriously, he didn’t take himself too seriously. He was also a fan of a lot of the same TV shows and movies as I was.
Knowing that he would not be in the least bit offended, one day I told him about Bob’s nickname for him. I also reminded him of the cricket story and how hard it was for me to not laugh. He thought it was hilarious too.
Some time later, Bob joined the dark side and came to work at the corporate office. One day at least a year after Bob joined the dark side I could tell that he was upset with me. When I asked what was wrong, Bob let me know that he knew that I had told the company president about his Star Wars names. Darth Vader himself had made a joke about it, and Bob was not happy.
Here’s what I learned.
I made a promise to Bob that I would never say anything about his Star Wars references. When I got to know the true character of the person those references were named at, I knew that there was no harm that would come of it. That is, I knew that Bob would not get in any kind of trouble for calling the company president Darth Vader.
My intuition proved to be true. The president thought it was funny, and eventually sought out an opportunity to joke around with Bob about it.
But Bob was still upset with me. Very upset, in fact.
Bob wasn’t upset with me because the president found out that his nickname was Darth Vader, Bob was upset with me because I betrayed his trust. Our agreement was not that I wouldn’t tell as long as he wouldn’t get in trouble. Our agreement was that I would not tell. Period.
When Bob explained it to me in those terms, I realized that he was right. I offered Bob a sincere apology, and I truly was sorry that I betrayed my friend.
Still, the damage was done. Bob never again trusted me after that. He remained friendly, but distant. He very seldom spoke to me first, and he never again trusted me with any personal information. I apologized numerous times over the next couple of years, but it did nothing to improve our relationship.
The only thing that might have been able to improve our relationship was if I could somehow earn Bob’s trust again. Unfortunately, since Bob wasn’t willing to share anything with me, that never did happen.
So my lesson was that trust is a very valuable and hard to come by thing. I do think that Bob over reacted. In fact, I’m certain that he did. I saw it as an instance of “no harm, no foul.” But I betrayed his trust, and that was a hard lesson for me to learn. Once trust has been lost, it truly is hard to earn back.
My words of advice today are, don’t take your relationships for granted. Relationships are built on trust, and trust is a very, very valuable thing. Honor that trust, and keep it in tact.
However, I’d also like to urge us all to seek reconciliation. Allow those who have betrayed our trust an opportunity to earn it back. There must be limits and boundaries that are put in place for protection, but earning trust back can potentially make a relationship stronger than it was before. After all, you never know when you might need a friend to help rescue you from Jabba’s Palace.
I’m Darrell Darnell and this has been stuff I learned yesterday.
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