"Don't piss in the well you drink from."

Hi there guys, I am reflecting on an incident that happened a few weeks ago and I am choosing to discuss what I have learnt from it here because it involves my father - I don't really have the kind of relationship with my father where I can sit him down and try to teach him something new. I'm afraid he is very old and even more autistic, so trying to get him to change his mind about an issue, trying to convince him that he is wrong is impossible but for what it is worth, I am going to share what I have learnt with you here and I am writing this primarily for my young readers in Singapore. So let's rewind all the way back to the summer when my boss was very excited when he hired a brilliant expert who had just left a major European bank to join the company - so let's call his expert Thomas (obviously not his real name) and I remember looking at his Linkedin profile: respect where respect is due, this guy had worked for so many of Europe's most prestigious banks and I could see why my boss was thrilled with him joining the team. However, I got off on a bad start with him - he tried to micromanage the way I communicated with one of my clients, so I politely told him to back off, explaining that I knew what I was doing, I didn't need that kind of interference. Then I decided that I can't work like this, I'd prefer to be far more autonomous - that's when I shifted to being on a commissions only contract where I had a far looser association with the company I worked for, they provided the products I sold and I only got paid when I did any sales. That was all back in summer - Thomas hadn't officially started yet then and most people in Europe take nice, long summer holidays (yes, even during the Covid-19 pandemic). Thus even if they can't leave the county, they would still take a few days off and visit somewhere quite local instead of an exotic, beautiful location far away on another continent. 

This is not your urinal, obviously.

So that was how we left things in the summer, then when autumn arrived and everyone got back to work, the 'Diana' (not her real name) incident happened - essentially, Thomas was assigned 'Diana' (not her real name) to help him carry out a lot of his plans for the company. She was young, inexperienced and failed in practically every thing he had asked her to do - I thus wrote a blog post about whether it was the company's responsibility to give Diana the training she needed to do her job properly or if it was a sink or swim situation, that people in this kind of situation have to rise to the occasion and learn fast or be fired. Let me jump to the punchline: Diana sank and she was fired. The day she was fired, my boss and Thomas had a meeting and Thomas was bemoaning how he felt bad about what happened to Diana but he really needed someone a lot more experienced and knowledgeable to do her job - then my boss pointed out that he knew the perfect person to do her job. Surprise, surprise: that was me, of course. I go back a long way with my current boss and I've worked for him for most of the last 10 years, so no one has invested more in training me up to teach me everything I know about banking than him. Thus if you're going to spend so much time and money training someone up to be competent, then you may as well use him when you have a role to fill. So my boss arranged for a conference call between Thomas and myself and I swear, Thomas couldn't have been more polite and nice to me on that call: it was quite a change. My boss told me to let that incident go about him trying to tell me what to do with my client, "he had just started then, he was trying to flex his muscles and show people that he was in a position to instruct. It was wrong, I've told him to trust you to do things your way, it won't happen again." I'm not a petty person, Thomas needed my help after Diana got fired and I said fine, but I want to renegotiate my contact and I want a bonus. In order to secure my participation in the team, my boss agreed to both my requests and furthermore - Thomas has been so nice to me since. 

I agreed to return to be part of the team under Thomas for the following reasons: we're in the middle of a deep recession here and this pandemic is not over yet - so having the financial security of being employed is prudent to say the least, given the mayhem and chaos I see around me in Europe with this second wave getting out of control. Secondly, I've worked with far more difficult people than Thomas - I can handle him. Whilst we got off to a rough start but to put things in context, he had to learn the hard way that he couldn't get anything done when he depended on Diana (and good luck to her finding a new job now) and there's one other colleague, let's call her Olga (again, obviously not her real name). She is not as hopeless as Diana but she doesn't get things done the way Thomas wants her to - English is her second language and whilst she is quite fluent in English, there are times when she struggles to find the right words during meetings with clients in English. I feel the same way when I have to do meetings in French or Mandarin, so obviously I sympathize with her - but not Thomas, English is also his second language so he's like, "if I'm able to function in an English-speaking business environment, Olga has no excuse whatsoever." Just two days ago, Thomas called me up out of desperation - he had asked Olga to do something for him, he had explained it to her several times in English (note that they don't speak each other's first language and have to default to communicating in English) what he needed to do and each time, she doesn't get it right. So he explained it to me and I said, "oh yes, I totally get it, I'm happy to do it - don't worry about it." So it is times like these that Thomas is immensely grateful for my help - whilst we'll never get along as great friends on a personal level (ironically, I do get along really well with Olga but she's a lot younger than Thomas), but still I have managed to established a functional working relationship with him because of this shared goal of getting work done - I'm a professional, I know how to put aside any personal feelings and find a way to work with people like Thomas.

So that's the situation at the moment and I'm fairly content with the situation - so I told my father what happened a few weeks ago and he was both cynical and pessimistic. I had analyzed the situation with my sister and she basically told me that because Thomas is white and my father is a racist who really hates white people, he has assumed that I didn't get along with Thomas initially because Thomas hates Asian people and that Thomas must be a racist. I've talked about this 'assumption of mutual hatred' theory before that a lot of racists like my father abide by: because my father has such deep hatred for white people (mind you, he hates everyone from blacks to Malays to Indians as well - he's just thoroughly racist), he assumes that white people must hate Asian people as well. He has no basis for this assumption of course, apart from his own racism. But rather than simply condemning my father for being this really evil racist (look no one condemns my father's racism more than me), I've decided to try to take a look at the issue from his point of view and please may I assure you that I'm not about to justify his kind of racism - no, his racism is totally abhorrent and has absolutely no place in this modern world. My father was a primary school teacher and he did witness a lot of racism amongst the students when he was teaching: having grown up in Singapore and gone through the education system there, oh I can tell you that there was a lot of racism here - it was mostly the Chinese students being very racist towards the Malays and the Indians there; I have to condemn it. It is wrong, it is immoral and the scary part of it all is that this occurred amongst very young students - so one could only assume that they were taught this kind of disgusting racist behaviour by their parents and that makes Singapore a scarily racist place. I simply can't condemn that situation enough.

Young students in primary school have the responsibility to do well in their exams but that is ultimately an individual effort - they may be made to do some group projects once in a while though these projects are not the key focus on their education. Indeed, many students in Singapore become fiercely competitive when it comes to their academic results - this results in an atmosphere where they become more and more individualistic. The problem with the education system is the lack of group projects which will teach students how to put aside their differences and learn to work together in a team - thus students don't often take group projects seriously enough, especially if there are no consequences when they score badly for it. Thus I have seen students in Singapore who have been shockingly racist but still perform extremely well academically, their immoral behaviour had no bearing whatsoever on their grades. Of course, this is not the case in the working world. Someone in Thomas' position would never get away with racism because he is dependent on his team to deliver results for the company - there is a high degree of team work involved in the work that we do, that's something I don't expect students or even teachers to understand. If someone in Thomas' position abuses his power by behaving in a racist manner, that would cost the company money and ultimately that would come back to haunt him, possibly costing him his job. That's why there's a saying that comes to mind which is, "don't piss in the well you drink from." Thus hypothetically speaking, even if Thomas was racist (and I stress, he is not racist) who hates Asian people, then he would choose to abuse some other Asian person in his life like a who works at his local supermarket or some random Asian person in the street he encounters but he would not be as dumb as to piss in the well that he is drinking from by being racist towards someone in a company he works for when this company is paying him quite a lot of money. 

Does my father understand the concept of "don't piss in the well you drink from"? No, he doesn't. You see, he is basing his judgement based on what he is observing in the primary school where he has worked for so many years. When children are in primary school, their social circles are very limited - they go to school and they might take part in some activities outside school but that's entirely dependent on their parents, for example, the parents might send them to swimming lessons or take them to church. But otherwise these primary school students will indeed piss in the well they drink from by bullying other students within their own class - this is not because they have done a complex risk-reward evaluation of the situation, no children that young are not capable of such analysis; rather it is because they're far less sophisticated and they are not as calculative as us adults. So that's why bullying is far more common in the school playground than in a workplace because adults are far more likely to think about the consequences of their actions, "if I use offensive racist language at work, I would get into trouble and it might affect the chances of me getting that promotion I had been working so hard for." So as working adults, we have learnt how to exercise a lot of restraint when it comes to our behaviour at work but in sharp contrast, this is something young children have yet to learn. Young children have no filter: they will simply say what they think without worrying about the consequences. I remember a Chinese boy in my kindergarten saying to our only Indian classmate, "why your skin so black one?" Of course, it sounds horrifically racist but that's a good example of someone dumb enough to piss in the well he is drinking from. That boy was racist towards his classmate, someone he had to face in the classroom everyday. The racist remark was reported and he was subsequently punished for it. Yes, you will be pleased to know this student didn't get away with that crass, racist remark! 

Allow me to talk about someone who did understand the concept of 'don't piss in the well you drink from' - many years ago, I had a colleague whom we shall call Tony (not his real name). Tony was a married man with two children, but he flirted a lot with most of the female colleagues in the office which I found surprising, given that it was not how I expected a married man to behave. Anyway, I didn't say anything about it until one day, I ran into Tony at a busy London train station - he was with a woman whom I had assumed was his wife, so I just went up to him and said hello, introduced myself and said, "hello I'm Alex, you must be Olivia!" I prided myself in remember his wife's name and I had simply assumed that the lady he was with was his wife. There was a very awkward pause when she looked at Tony and then she turned back to me said, "actually, my name is Isabelle..." Then it dawned on me that Tony was with a woman who was not his wife, Tony then said, "I'm terribly sorry but we're in a hurry now, I'll see you in the office tomorrow, okay?" So the next day in the office, he came clean to me, yes he was seeing Isabelle as a 'special friend'. His wife has no idea what is going on and he would like to keep it that way, so it would be really convenient if I could simply forget that I had ran into them at the train station. I told him it was none of my business what he got up to in his private life, but I confessed that the other colleagues had suspected that he may have had a thing going on with one of the female colleagues in the office. Tony then smirked and said, "first rule about having an affair - never piss in the well you drink from, never get involved with a colleague as it can get very messy after the affair ends and you still have to face each other at work everyday. Isabelle is a militant vegan who runs a vegan restaurant and my wife loves meat - their paths are never going to cross. Men who choose to have affairs don't intend to get caught you now? After all, my wife knows where I work, she even knows some of the colleagues upstairs - oh, she could easily show up at the office anytime she wants." 

Hey, don't get me wrong - I'm not saying for a moment that racism in the West doesn't exist at all: yes it does, but we need to understand this kind of racism a lot better if we're going to talk about it intelligently and make sense of it. I'm going to use a case study which I have discussed on my blog: back on the 23rd February this year, Singaporean student Jonathan Mok was subject to a racist attack whilst in central London. Mok was first subjected to verbal abuse about the Coronavirus before being brutally beaten up by four white youths. The attack was totally unprovoked and Mok had never met the people who attacked him before. I need to point out that Mok wasn't attacked by people he knew from where he lived or from his university - they were complete strangers who picked Mok out as a target because there was no previous connection between them and Mok. They were intending to commit the crime, flee from the scene and get away with it - they didn't hang around waiting to be arrested. It took the police many days to track them down with CCTV and a very thorough investigation before the perpetrators were finally arrested and made to face justice. But let me also share another story of mistaken identity to reiterate this point of 'don't piss in the well you drink from'. My friend Frank is black and lives in London, so one evening as he was returning home after work, he saw the police outside the block of flat where he lived. As he approached the entrance, one policeman approached him and asked him if he could answer a few questions - an old white lady who lived in the block was robbed by a black man earlier that day, she had given a brief description of what her attacker looked like to the police and thus they were questioning all the black men who could match that description in the vicinity. They started asking Frank some questions and he was cooperating with the police. 

Frank had been at work all day and he had plenty of colleagues who could vouch that he was at his place of work when the attack took place - he was just about to get in touch with his supervisor when the old white lady who was attacked approached them and said to the policeman, "what are you doing? That young man is Frank, he's my neighbour, I've known him for years - he's not that man who attacked me, why are you questioning him? Frank, I am so sorry about this." Luckily, it was not like the police were rude to Frank or anything like that but he was just asked to provide an alibi - so when Frank told me about what happened the next day, he told me, "even if I wanted to go rob an old lady, why would I rob a neighbour whom I have known for so many years, who would recognize me instantly? I know so many people in the block where I live, even when I am just going to work or popping out to the local supermarket, I run into people I know! I live in North London - so if I was going to plan a robbery, I would go to South London or East London or even a town outside London, like somewhere pretty darn far away, somewhere I had never been to before. I would target someone totally at random, then get the hell out of there, never to return there ever again. Any criminal with half a brain wouldn't commit a crime so close to where he lives, not unless he has hoping to get caught. The moment I told the policeman that I lived there, he should have realized that the chances of me being the criminal they were after was zero. What kind of criminal would actually return to the scene of the crime? You'd have to be totally brazen or stupid to do that. Your every instinct as a criminal would be telling you to get as far away from the scene of the crime as you could because the police would be looking for you." Hence even petty criminals don't piss in the well that they drink from, let alone someone like Thomas. So why did my father think that someone as intelligent as Thomas would be racist at work? 

I'm sure some of you would know the Alfred Hitchcock classic film 'Strangers On A Train' from 1951. I know it is an old black and white film but trust me, it is absolutely brilliant and it does illustrate the point of 'don't piss in the well that you drink from'. Guy and Bruno - two complete strangers - run into each other on a train and they start talking on this long journey, it turns out that the both of them have someone in their lives they would love to kill, but because they have a very strong motivation to kill that person, they could never get away with it as they would be the prime suspect. Guy is desperate to divorce his promiscuous wife Miriam so he can get on with his life whilst Bruno hates his father and wants him dead. Bruno then comes up with the audacious but great idea: two perfect strangers meet and "swap murders" - Bruno suggests he kills Miriam and Guy kills Bruno's hated father. Each would murder a total stranger with no apparent motive, so neither will be suspected and it would be the perfect crime where they could both literally get away with murder. I'm not going to tell you how it ends - you're just going to have to watch it for yourself but it does illustrate how intelligent criminals plan the perfect crime. Unfortunately, after working all his life in a primary school, my father is so used to dumb kids who get into scuffles in the school playground without thinking of the consequences of their actions - therefore my father actually believes that adults would behave in the same way when really, there is a huge difference in the way adults think and operate when they want to do commit something like a hate crime, a robbery or a murder - part of the plan would always involve how they would get away with the scene of the crime. I suppose there's a part of me that has been very frustrated all these years with having a father who is clueless about how the adult world operates, so imagine having a father who thinks that adults out there would always behave like young children in a primary school! 

Are all primary school teachers as naive as my father? I don't think so - I think it would depend on how much contact they would have with other adults outside the school throughout their time as teachers. For years, my father had been observing how young children behave in the school playground with each other and perhaps that's his only reference to how people behave given he had few friends outside work. But then again, how young children behave is quite different from how adults behave - we develop better social skills as we grow older and learn to form far more complex relationships with those around us as adults. That's a process that really only happens after we leave primary school but of course, my father never gets to see that in the primary school where he worked all those years. So he would regularly encounter young students who have no filter, who would blurt out crass, offensive, racist remarks without thinking of the consequences of their words - he does have some (limited) interaction with the other teachers in the school, but I get the feeling they are as clueless as he is when it comes to social skills and they are in no position to teach him anything. There are different reasons why you may not get along with someone at work - racism is but one of many reasons. Yet that is the one that my father always defaults to because of this assumption of 'mutual hatred' - he hates white people so he assumes that white people must hate him. But that's completely untrue of course: I believe that how well I get along with Thomas really depends on how useful I am to him in the work place - after all, he has just joined the company and is very keen to prove himself to be the hero of the day. He left a good job to join my company so he has a point to prove as well. He has very ambitious plans that can't achieve alone and if he needs my help to make his plans come to fruition, then of course he is going to treat me well. Now that is the context which determines the dynamics of the working relationship between Thomas and I - this is Thomas' well and he sure as hell isn't going to piss in it by being racist to me.

There you go, that's it from me on this issue - what do you think? Do you believe that most adults are rational enough to understand the simple concept of 'don't piss in the well that you drink from'? Have you actually met people who do defy logic and piss in the well they do drink from? Do you know of people who would commit immoral or criminal acts as long as it is so far away from their own backyard that their actions cannot be traced back to them? Or do you think that some people could obtain power only to then abuse that power? Leave a comment below please and many thanks for reading.