This is a little off-base for me, but last night I was subjected to like the least polite phonecall I’ve had for… oh, at least three days. Normally I’m unfazed by rudeness, and I have an unusually high tolerance for arrogance and lack of empathy and class, what with me living in a glass house and all. But some people you just want to boot off a cliff.

It’s been building up for weeks, too. This… individual, let us call him Thoughtless Jerk, this guy e-mailed me out of the blue on an e-mail address I abandoned two years ago, of which he was notified at that time, and he demanded that since he was coming back into town from a very far away place, I should e-mail all his friends at once and insist we all get together.

Compounding the rudeness of such a gesture (that is, making me the middleman), I obeyed.

So, a few weeks later, he’s now calling every couple of days whining about how so-and-so – whom he’s now contacted out of pique, since I’ve told him they were unavailable – still can’t come. Woe! It really came to a head last night. TJ’s exact words were, “Well, when you see _______ again, you can tell him I’m just really disappointed in him not coming. Just really disappointed.” I gently pointed out that this young man had made plans literally months ago. “Well, there are such a thing as priorities! God.”

Leaving aside his subject-verb agreement, I repeated that some people had prior plans which they did not care to break. (And I was being nice. Some people, upon hearing that he was in town, spontaneously retched. Others hurried to make plans for that night. Some simply asked me, “Can you just tell him I really don’t like him all that much?”)

TJ goes into a rant about how everyone should have – seriously – cancelled their plans on the Saturday of the August long weekend in order to attend his lame-ass barbecue at his inlaws’ house, complete with screaming kids and his idiotic cliques of friends who won’t even talk to each other because they’re too ‘cool.’ I made an excuse and got off the phone and just seethed. OK. He thinks we’re all the impolite ones. Two weeks ago he invited me to dinner, then cancelled at the last minute. Then he rescheduled to Saturday – meaning I stayed at home all night – and didn’t even bother to call. “That? Oh, yeah, I called that off. Anyway, are you getting everyone to come to this thing?”

Have you ever encountered anyone who was so overweeningly arrogant as to assume that his mere presence is enough to attract attendees to an event? I mean, other than Prince? Why should anyone give up their time to involve themselves in this guy’s life, when he never involves himself in anyone else’s? “Oh, I’m busy,” he whines. Yeah. You’re busy half a world away, but it doesn’t make you any busier than us. We’ve all got twenty-four hours in our day no matter where we live. And amazingly, we all work forty hours a week – which you don’t even do – and we commute, have hobbies, play sports, and hang out with family and friends too. I just cannot believe this guy. What makes his time so much more valuable than ours? What makes him so special that we should give a flying hoo-ha about him, when he doesn’t give one about us – even going through someone else (me!) to contact the so-called friends whose friendship he has basically invented. I hope he finds out eventually, and not through me, that a lot of people think he’s an intolerable little shit.

(rant, spazz, thud)

PS. For those of you about to ream me out for talking about him behind his back, thus being even ruder than him, he’s getting an abridged version of this later in e-mail. But I appreciate your attention to detail.