Follow up on Mr. N

Let's get this out of the way: The "N" does NOT stand for "Nice."

Mr. N was about 35 years old when I first met him while working for News Monitoring Services. I didn't realize he was the owner until after I had worked a few shifts there. He had started up the business with his wife, who had become his ex-wife within the previous few years.

Mr. N's attitude toward the workplace was similar to the man John Cleese says inspired the character of Basil Fawlty (paraphrasing): "I would be able to run this hotel if it weren't for the guests." Mr. N's take on it was that he would be making a lot of money if he didn't have to pay his employees. Every time he gave us our paychecks, he would say to everyone, "You're supposed to buy my lunch," but I don't really think he was joking that much. He would get really upset if we made some sort of mistake that resulted in the company not making a sale and this would result in one of his tirades of verbal abuse.

He complained that when he first started the business, it was easy to do as a two-person operation because there was only 4 1/2 hours of local news content in San Diego at the time. The two people would monitor all the news and then get on the phone and sell the video clips. As the local stations increased their news programming, it had become 10 hours' worth a day when I first started at News Monitoring Services and increased to more than 24 hours by the time I left. No one or two people could monitor that much news AND have time to sell the clips. It became very necessary to have employees to do all that work.

One thing Mr. N had fantasized about was having a physical relationship with one of his female employees. This would have been the ultimate: Him paying the woman to have sex with him and it would be completely legal. And he actually accomplished this, but it ended very badly.

It was Mr. N's ex-wife who had the most impact on his attitude toward everyone at work and those he did business with. She was from England. They married and had a little boy. Then they got divorced and started battling for custody over their son. In the middle of the court hearings, she took their son and went to England. She was there for several years. In the meantime, Mr. N hired an investigator to track them down. When she was found, Mr. N found out that she'd given birth to a girl, who was their child. He had them extradited to the United States, where she was forced to remain and allow him visitation.

At one point after she'd returned, she told the police he had molested his kids and he was arrested. While he was in holding, a couple of other inmates believed him and were able to protect him from being assaulted by the others. At his arraignment, the judge could tell that the charges were pretty much fabricated by his ex and he released him. However, they lost his clothes, so he had to wear the holding facility jumpsuit back home.

I only ever saw his ex-wife once when she came to the office. She was pleasant at first, but when Mr. N wanted to show her the TV studio he had built, she turned real nasty real quick and got mad at him for trying to waste her time when she was there to pick up the children.

Once, I was doing some work on the weekend. This was during a period of time in which I didn't have a car and had to rely on public transport. I needed to be at the office at a certain time to load the next set of videotapes for recording. There was going to be a two-hour gap between the time that I left and the time the tapes needed to roll. Since I didn't want to take the bus home, wait for an hour and then take the bus back, I figured on taking a nap on the lobby furniture. However, Mr. N had come by with his kids to take care of something. And before I left, he had decided that the three of them were going to take a nap on the lobby furniture. Since I didn't want to spend free time there while he was around, I just took the bus home and came back. I was pretty irritated about that.

But not as irritated as his ex-wife was. When I came in to work the next day, she had sent a fax stating she had found out he had the kids sleeping on the lobby furniture. (I assume the kids told her where they slept.) She was threatening to have him charged with child abuse over that. But I don't think anything came out of that.

So, it looked like all of the money he earned from the company was going to pay his attorney. This kind of explained why he would go berserk when something happened that caused him to not earn money from the clips. But it certainly didn't excuse him constantly berating his employees.

He later went through this series of AOL relationships. He would chat up women on AOL, convince them to move to San Diego with him, and then treat them like crud until they decided to leave. Sometimes, it was hard for them to do this because they had spent everything they had to come be with him. At one point, he tried to get me to train one of them to do a part of my job, which was preparing and labeling the tapes for recording. I told him I preferred doing it myself. From my prior conversations with this woman, it was clear she was too stupid to stick labels on videotape. I knew that she would screw this simple task up and he'd just wind up yelling at me for it.

But this woman appeared to have a moment of clarity. We used to record radio on videotape by using the lobby surveillance camera as a control track. At about 3pm one day, they came into the lobby. The video showed him talking very sternly to her and pointing his finger. He came into the office and she stayed in the lobby. I could tell she was crying and figuring out that she couldn't do this anymore. I was listening for a particular radio news story and saw this scene play out over and over as I monitored each individual station. I never saw that woman again after that.

He did the same thing to another woman, who appeared to have some actual intelligence. But when she decided to leave, he wouldn't let her have her refrigerator back. They wound up on a TV courtroom show. Most episodes of this particular show feature two cases per half-hour, but this took the WHOLE half hour. At one point, the judge ordered a friend of the woman to leave the courtroom, which was something that almost never happens. In the end, Mr. N was ordered to give back the refrigerator. Those of us at work had no idea he was going to be on this show, and we wouldn't have seen it, except that the station that carried the show did a news story about the guy who got kicked out. We watched the program at work, but pretty soon after that, every copy we had of that broadcast disappeared.

So, where is Mr. N now? He later got into real estate and tries to make films on the side. He lives in Murietta, CA. His son has become a skateboarder and lives in Los Angeles, but I don't know what happened to his daughter and ex-wife.

I guess he's able to make money now that he doesn't have to mess with lawyers anymore.