Narcissists of the World Unite!

All names have been significantly changed!!!

As coworkers went Andy Martin was the absolute worst. Before his retirement he carried a well earned reputation of being an egotistical, but yet insecure asshole with the vast majority of people who had any encounter with him while on the job. Unfortunately, Andy was on the three man team I was part of that took care of hospital sterilizers. That meant I had to work closely with him on a daily basis. And as you might be able to guess, I was subject to many of his lies, mind games, and outright scams.

The most audacious scam was during the time the third man on our team was a patient in the hospital. We're both at work but Andy calls me up on the phone and says I own him fifty-dollars for my share of the flowers he purchased for our coworker getting surgery. I knew nothing about Andy getting flowers and had never agreed to share the cost on anything. My refusal to cough up any money left Andy stuttering on the phone so badly that he hung up on me. That was a pretty typical example of his underhanded nature.

Anyone working with Andy quickly realized he had no conscious and an extremely exaggerated opinion of himself. And yes, he was obsessed with status and not losing face in front of others. Hence why he called on the phone instead of finding me and asking for the fifty-dollar flower money in person. While this particular scam fell short, Andy was the type that held grudges.

While Andy was a very short, overweight, middle-aged man he regularly bragged about his Ford Mustang, his Harley motorcycle, and his truck which was one of the overly large types. Along with that, he never stopped talking about the land he owned, his extra house in North Carolina, and his numerous guns. I can't help but mention the regular and excruciatingly detailed stories of his home improvement projects he would tell to near captive audiences, complete with a seemingly infinite number of boring pictures showing his progress.

My weirdest incident with Andy occurred over a pair of pliers of mine that in the space of a few seconds went missing. We were both sitting on the floor fairly close to each other working on a particular type of sterilizer. My tools for this repair were situated on the floor to my left while Andy's was on his right. During this repair, I had to crawl under the sterilizer with my pliers to loosen a valve that was giving us trouble. Once it was loosen enough to be removed by hand, I dropped my pliers on the floor between Andy and myself and pulled the valve free of the sterilizer. In the space of a few seconds as I worked the worn part out of the sterilizer assembly, my pliers grew legs and walked away.

I immediately confronted Andy about the location of the pliers but he played stupid saying he hadn't touched or seen what happened to them. While the missing/stolen tool was a minor inconvenience since my boss would order me another, Andy had an evil grin on his face worthy of some Bond villain whose plan to take over the world was on the verge of succeeding. This little piece of bullshit was Andy getting even for me not falling for his fifty-dollar flower scam or some other little imagined insult to his dignity. The one overriding fact in all this I have to make clear was that Andy knew I understood he had stolen my pliers.

Going to the boss and accusing Andy of petty thievery would have resulted in him going all drama queen making everyone's life a pain in the ass for days. Yeah, stupid stuff like this with Andy happened on a regular basis. So much that a few years later management forced Andy into retirement. Most people who work at the hospital for as long as Andy have nice retirement parties thrown in their honor. Not him, in fact absolutely no tears were shed as he packed up his belongings and clocked out on his final day.

This true story of a narcissistic asshole should sound sickeningly familiar on a national scale.

For Trump's entire time occupying the Oval Office, he has been dogged with evidence that in some form or the other he, his family, and his advisers conspired with the Russian government to influence the 2016 election in his favor. Absolutely nothing in his behavior nor actions has done anything to dissuade rational people of that idea. In fact, everything Trump does has some clear benefit to Russia, whether its undermining the NATO alliance, the European Union, our position in the Middle East, or just our national security. As Speaker Pelosi recently told him during a heated exchange, “All roads lead to Putin for you.”

So Friday when it was announced Trump was considering an invitation to attend the May Day Parade in Moscow, the memories of Andy and the stolen pliers came flashing back to me. It's almost like Trump is daring us to accuse him again of being a Russian agent. Just when I thought Trump couldn't be any more brazen with his Russian sympathies than the time during the Helsinki summit a few years ago when he did everything to appease Putin short of kissing his ass on live television.

After three years occupying the White House, you would think the depth of Trump's narcissistic behavior couldn't get any worse. That the Republican Party and his cabinet and staff would force him to adhere to some sort of limits on his extreme behavior. I knew from day one after the November 2016 election that he would be a nightmare, but I never considered how insidious his corruption and narcissism would be to the nation. One little, insecure man with delusions of grandeur can make the workplace a pain. You put a similar individual into a position of power and he threaten the foundation of everything good in an incredibly short time.