My landlady was driving me home from a hospital appointment today and we passed a small restaurant, and she told me a story about something her old boss did in that restaurant.

She worked as a nurse in a nursing home for dementia patients. Her boss, Paul, was the owner of multiple nursing homes and had become a multi-millionaire this way. Of course he still paid his staff the bare minimum needed to retain them, and kept conditions for the patients as sparse as possible to save money, hoarding the immense profits for himself. He never gave his staff extra money at xmas or anything, completely stingy fucker. The only thing he did, once a year, was take them to a cheap restaurant as their annual bonus/gift.

This one time he took them to the restaurant we were driving past. It was a small restaurant owned by one woman, mainly struggling by on her own with just one cook. He didn’t like the music they were playing so during dinner he called the owner over and rudely demanded that she play music from the 60s and 70s, his favourite music, instead. She told him they didn’t have any 60s or 70s music. He demanded to know why, and she said because she didn’t like it.

This made Paul rage. I don’t know whether because he didn’t get the music he wanted or because the woman didn’t like his taste in music, but either way he decided she needed to be punished. So a few days later he got multiple people to phone up and make bookings for a particular night, booking all the tables out that night. Then none of them turned up, costing an already struggling tiny business a whole night’s profits, on what was usually the busiest night of the week. This was a man in late middle age doing this.

Whether because of this we don’t know, but soon after the business went under and was sold to someone else who struggled to build it back up. I just thought, what an absolutely disgusting person, a multimillionaire purposely sabotaging a struggling local business out of pure spite over nothing at all. People like this really exist and walk among us, not just the Jeff Bezos of the world but local people everywhere too.