He Knew What He Was Doing
My first boss was the manager at a gas station where I used to work. He was good in most ways—efficient, fair, disciplined, ran a tight ship. There was just one drawback. He was racist. And when I say racist, I don’t mean that he was insufficiently outraged by Dukes of Hazard re-runs.
I mean that he used terrible racial slurs often and loudly. This guy resurrected some old racist words that would have sent Bull Connor running for a thesaurus.
And to make matters worse, the truck driver who delivered our tankers of fuel every week was a minority, and he often overheard my boss using this kind of language. The two of them almost came to blows over this on more than one occasion.
His comeuppance finally came when the corporate office hired a new third-level supervisor, a young man out of business school who happened to be of a minority background.
The racist boss just could not take orders from someone of another race. When he quit, he trashed the office and tore up every floppy disk we had (it was the 80s) so that we couldn’t do our accounting for a few days.