People Question Their Morals In Their "Am I The Jerk?" Stories

“My best friend has been a beacon in my life for years and was a great example to me of how to be a rock-solid, steady, consistent person. Whenever I had issues, they were there to counsel me through them.

For the sake of this story, I’m going to name my best friend Ryan. Ryan and I along with a group of friends relocated to another city several years ago for professional reasons (we both had separate reasons to go to the same city, and roomed together with a small group of guys in a rented home).

When we arrived in this new place, he started seeing a great girl and they’re now married with one kid and another on the way. I got engaged in the fall and will be getting married in the summer to a girl who is childhood friends with Ryan’s wife.

For the sake of this story, my SO’s name will be Samantha. Ryan’s wife isn’t relevant to the story, I’m leaving her out of this.

Samantha’s dad runs a small business, and for the sake of not identifying myself, I won’t reveal what they do.

It’s not really relevant to the story, it’s just important that you know that these were all relatively close friendships. Samantha’s dad trusted Ryan to manage and run things (think MM business that didn’t require much in the way of personnel).

Samantha handled invoicing and some sales and Ryan handled GM duties and would frequently travel to meet new clients and schmooze potential ones.

I’ll be the first to admit that Samantha’s dad (I’ll call him Rick) is very old-fashioned in the way of business, and is constantly trying to work angles to save and maximize profits.

It’s very off-putting to millennials to do things this way because it’s honestly kind of sleazy, but in the end, no one complained because they were making income. They were so old-fashioned that Rick refused to digitize their books and wouldn’t let anyone else handle accounting.

To save the company and the employees funds, everyone was 1099. No W2s were handed out, which was stated as a major reason by Ryan as to why he did what he did.

Rick also has severe issues trusting people with his business, and Ryan states that he was never really given the freedom to do what he needed to do. Samantha disputes this and claims Rick never came around to check up.

She says there was never smoke where Ryan claimed there was a fire. That’s all minor compared to what happened, so I’ll move on.

After around a year of Ryan working there, Samantha began dropping small comments to me here and there about how Ryan wasn’t doing what he was supposed to.

Rick had required them from the beginning to report on progress every week, and it was Samantha’s job to ensure that Ryan completed them. Samantha would submit her end of the reports every week, and Ryan would never fill his out.

But if Samantha never did her reports, Ryan would chastise her for not completing them. Rick was honestly so busy that he never looked at them anyway unless there was a client issue that he was trying to trace the source of.

I’ll also admit that Samantha was not always perfect in what she did, and sometimes has trouble focusing and following through. Her punctuality also isn’t the best. This was another point of tension for her and Ryan, for which he would chastise her.

However, Ryan also frequently decided to “work from home” some days, which we all know is a fancy way to say “I want to sleep in”.

At this point in the timelines, the company had gotten involved in contracts for a somewhat large business, I’ll call them Black Harbor.

The guy who runs it is a rotten human being (we’ll call him Chad), manipulative and abusive in all of his ways. That’s not a matter of opinion, most of the industry in our town won’t touch him.

He’s radioactive and has a bad reputation for screwing people over. He’s only still in business because he does a ton of government contracting, and can’t get other businesses to work with him (shocker).

I don’t know how Ryan got contracted with them, but he did. It should have set off alarms that they were working together, but for whatever reason, it didn’t.

Back in December, Samantha’s family and I were about to leave for an extended vacation.

To say it had been a stressful year for everyone was a significant understatement, and we were all looking forward to the downtime. As we’re packing our bags the night before the departure, Rick gets a call from Ryan.

Ryan says he’s found another job and quits on the spot. No two weeks’ notice. This is understandably upsetting to Rick, and Ryan follows that gut punch with a bullet to the head – he’s going to work for Black Harbor as a sales director.

Suddenly, all of Ryan’s trips to Black Harbor HQ made sense. Chad had been grooming him to steal him from the company so he could cancel the $500,000+ in contracts and just pay Ryan a salary.

Ryan, who is well-intentioned but I believe severely naive, claimed that wasn’t the case. Rick reminds him that he signed a non-compete and that this was a clear violation. He also reminds him that he would’ve been in the clear if he had waited nine more days, as his contract expired on the first of the year.

Rick goes on to generally blast him for pulling something like this right before Christmas, and right before they were going to leave for vacation. Ryan quite literally doesn’t understand, even after the two of them sat down and discussed it only a couple of hours later.

I knew Ryan was struggling for money. What he hadn’t told Rick or anyone else was that he’d put in a bid on a house that was rejected because he was 1099 and not W2.

He ran around our circle of friends after he left the company and told people that was a major reason he left. He didn’t bring that up to Rick a single time, orally or in writing.

He never spoke a word of it to Samantha. In fact, the myriad of mostly moronic reasons he brought up to other people to justify his move was never once communicated. It seems to me that if you’re going to screw people over by leaving a company, you should do it once you’ve established your reasons in writing.

Emails, texts, etc. That way you have something to fall back on if you need to ethically prove your case. We live in an at-will state, and Ryan can leave anytime for any reason.

No one, Rick included, had any issue that Ryan left. It was how he did it. Rick spent well over a year training him, mentoring him, and connecting him in the industry, and Ryan took all of that and left for a direct competitor without any warning or negotiation, and took a lot of money with him.

He also fails to understand how Black Harbor was gaslighting him the entire time he was working with them on contracts and resents the idea that they’d do that despite Chad’s clear track record.

All in all, the time I wanted to spend with my family several hours away had to be cut several days short due to Samantha having to help put out the massive fire that this became.

Hundreds of thousands of dollars in contracts were gone. The company has recovered only after Rick threatened to sue over the non-compete, and Chad at Black Harbor reinstated the contracts he attempted to back out of.

Chad claims not to have known that Ryan quit so soon, and was waiting for his employment contract to expire. In general, it’s just a bad look on Ryan.

And now, after Rick has gone through Ryan’s email account, it’s become clear that a great deal of communications with Black Harbor was happening off the record.

They’d reach a point in discussions to where Ryan would ask to move the conversation to another email account. That’s sketchy in itself, but what’s also curious is that Rick never knew that Ryan was paying so much attention to Black Harbor that the company’s smaller clients were getting practically no attention.

Multiple smaller clients dropped the company’s services because their emails were going unanswered, which was Ryan’s responsibility. He told no one about this.

Every time we’ve talked to Ryan about it (he’s always the one that brings it up), he claims “I just had to do what was right for me and my family”.

Are we the jerks? The whole situation seems insanely unprofessional to me, and every time we confront him with how we feel, we’re told, “I see where you’re coming from, and I don’t agree.” There was no warning that this was coming to ANYONE and there was no communication whatsoever about Ryan’s frustrations.

However… he’s convinced he made the right move.”

Another User Comments:

“No one is a jerk here.

I can completely see why Ryan was upset about being kept as a contractor when in fact he was acting as an employee.

I contracted at a place that did something similar to lighten the burden of employees on the books but I was informed that it was completely illegal in that state to do so.

They were playing roulette with the tax man and I don’t know how it ended up for them.

Maybe Ryan is taking the “gig” nature of his job too far and thinking he can just bail for a better offer.

Luckily for Rick, he had that non-compete in the contract but honestly, he could have offered him the security of a real job with prospects instead.

For Ryan to jump ship with no notice at Christmas with only 8 days before his contract ended was shortsighted and very inconvenient for his employer but Rick could have let him go then, too, however.

I voted no jerks here because I think that everyone in the story was a little jerkish to each other (with Chad an obvious scoundrel) but not to the degree that ESH.” f_me_blue

Another User Comments:

“NTJ, he is doing what he thinks is right for his family, but it totally screwed Rick’s business. It was a selfish decision, though that does happen in business.

It’s kinda where the saying “it’s just business” comes from. Because sometimes these things seem cold as heck.

Ryan is totally a jerk. You guys have the right to be mad.” CeleryRoot1983