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Dan Kennedy (1:31)

Welcome to the Moth Podcast. I'm Dan Kennedy. This podcast is brought to you by Audible.com, the Internet's leading provider of audiobooks with more than 100,000 downloadable titles across all types of literature. For the Moth listeners, Audible is offering a free audiobook to give you a chance to try out their service. You may like to consider listening to Liz Free or Die, written and read by Liz Winstead, one of the Moth's dynamic storytellers. In her collection of essays, Liz humorously reveals her childhood longings, her role in developing the Daily show, and her habit of diving into everything headfirst. That's Liz Liz Free or Die, written and read by comedian and social critic Liz Winstead. It's available from Audible. To try Audible Free today and get a free audiobook of your choice, go to audible.comthemoth that's audible.comthemoth this week we bring you two stories from our Story Slam series. And as you probably know, our Story Slams are the open mic stories storytelling competitions that we do in seven cities across the country. Now, our first story, told by Mike Dang, was told live at a Story Slam in New York City earlier this year and the theme of the night was Bosses.

Mike Dang (2:54)

So I am 20 years old and I am on my college campus, sitting in the student housing center, and I'm begging, begging for my job. I'm student housing information center advisor. So I'm one of those people who sits at a desk and answers questions from, you know, parents or students who have questions before they come to campus. And I also give tours of student housing, and I'm going to study abroad. And you can't be a tour guide if you're studying abroad because all the tours happen during the summer when students are looking at housing. And my boss is Emily, and I love her. She's 26 years old and. And I feel like she is a billion years older than me, but she's six years older than me, and she's gorgeous, and she's the nicest Republican I've ever met. And she likes to tell deprecating stories about herself during staff meetings. Like the time when she was in college and she was running a half marathon and, you know, 100ft before the finish line, she accidentally goes number two in her pants so she doesn't finish. And then during our stage, after dinner, she lets me drink her beer because I'm 20 years old and I'm practically old enough anyway. And she tells me, mike, we love you. Everyone here loves you. Yes, we will let you have your job, and you're the only one who we've ever let do this. So I go and I go to study in Cambridge, and I come back and I walk into the office, and Emily is not there. She's been promoted across campus. And in her place is Rick, and he is 29 years old, and he's from Kentucky. And he comes up to me and he says, so you're Mike. You're the tour guide that everyone's been talking about, and I really want to get to know you. So, you know, during my time there, I was just trying to get used to this new boss. And anytime they wanted to send some documents to the housing office that Emily was now working at, I would beg them to send me so I can go see her. And Rick really wanted to bond with me, so he asked me if he. He could take weekly walks with me around the campus just to get to know me. And I say, okay. And I go and I say, okay, so what do you want to talk about? And he says, well, I just really want to be your friend because everyone seems to like you, and I want to be your friend, and it's very important for me that I am your friend, too. And I said, oh, I'm sure everything will be Fine, because what else do you say in that situation? So he goes on a lot of my tours, and he just to watch me give tours and gush about campus life. And he laughs at all the jokes. Like the one time during my freshman year when I threw a burning cake out the window because I accidentally bought trick candles. And the fire department came and they saw this cake burning on the grass, and parents are laughing about that, and he's laughing at that, and he says, you're so funny. You're such a great tour guide. And I say, thank you. And I run away because I don't like compliments. So he keeps on asking me to go on these walks with me. And every time he asks me to go on a walk with him, I say, oh, okay. And he can tell that I don't like to go on walks with him, and I just really want him to just be my boss and to leave me alone. And he stops and he gets really stolen. He stops talking to me. And during lunch one day, I bring up a discussion I had in one of my classes about how 30 days after conception, a fetus sort of looks like a shrimp. And he looks down at his salad and he pushes it away, gets up in disgust, and he says, come to my office right now. And I say, okay. And he says, that was very inappropriate. You shouldn't say that. You don't know what people have been through. So the next semester, I find out everything that Rick has been through. I'm sitting at the information center, and I have to go to the bathroom. So I call into the office and I say, can someone please take over for me? And the office is busy, so Rick says he'll come and sit at the desk and man the computer and man the questions. And he does. And I go to the bathroom, and I get a snack, and I come back, and Rick doesn't say anything to me. And when I sit down, I look at my screen and it's blank. And I'm a little upset because I had my eight tabs, you know, for my websites there, and he closed them all. So I think, well, that's unfair. And I pull up the browser history to find my tabs, and I see everything that Rick has been looking at. And that's when I find his blog. And that's when I find everything that Rick has been hiding from everyone. All his sexual encounters, which I sort of gloss over because that makes me nervous. So I just sort of, you know, skip over to the other parts where he's doing drugs and then to the parts where he gets over the drugs. And then I'm reading about me, and it says, I hope that Mike eats some shrimp one day and chokes on it and dies. And I think, oh, my gosh. Because I don't swear. I immediately press command F because I want to. Every single mention of my name. And I find another post where he's taking me on a walk, and he lures me into a basement and he locks me a tank of water, and he just stands there and watches me drown. And then in another post, I'm having dinner with him and I'm eating and I'm choking, and he just sits there and he watches me choke. And then my face hits the table with a thwack. So I sit there stunned, just completely stunned. And I'm not like a normal person who would want to call the police. So I blame myself for all of it. And because I'm a son of a tiger mother, and I just learned to blame myself for everything. So was I not nice enough to Rick? Was I too nice to other people? But then I got some sense into myself and said, no, you idiot. He wants to kill you, and this is not okay. Also, you need to figure out if fantasies actually lead to actual murder. So after my shift is over, I clear the browsing history and I go into the office and I get my backpack, and I'm trying not to look at Rick because I feel his eyes on me, and I feel like if I look into his eyes, I'm going to scream. And I walk out the door and I run to my car, and I check the back seat of my car to make sure Rick is not sitting in the backside. Because if Rick is the sort of person who has murder fantasies, I'm the sort of person who has fantasies of being murdered all the time. So I drive home to my roommate staff, and she is in the housing office, too. She works as administrative assistant. And I want to tell her about it. And if this is a horror film, Rick would have tied her to a chair, and he would be standing there waiting for me to draw me in the bathtub. And he totally would, because I'm only five'seven and I only weigh 120 pounds. And that's very easy to overpower. But Seth is just sitting there watching Friends. And I say, hey, can I show you a website? And she says, sure. And I show her the blog, and she says, oh, my gosh. Well, not oh, my gosh, she swore, but. And she says, what are you gonna do? And I said, I Think I'm gonna print this entire website out because if you deletes it, I'm gonna need proof. So I do, and I print it. And she said, now what? And I say, I'm call Emily because I love Emily, and she. She was my boss and she would know what to do. So I call Emily and I say, I just sent you a link to a website. Can you look at it and tell me what to do? And she swears on the phone, and then she says, you need to call Kim. Kim is her boss and Rick's boss, and I need to talk to Kim. So I talked to Kim, I email her, and Kim says, I'm not going to be on campus for two days, so can you wait just two days? And I say, okay. And I wait for two days, and Kim meets with me for coffee. And we're sitting there and she's like, so what did you want to meet about? And I said, here, just look at these papers. And I hand her the stack of papers, and she looks at it, and she was like, why did you wait two days? I would have come back immediately. Don't come to work. Just go home. We will call you when we have something. You know, when we figure out what we're gonna do. So I go home, and I realized that I had given Kim the stack of papers and I hadn't printed out a second copy. When I go onto the website, it's been deleted. And Kim calls me and she says, don't come to work. You'll get your paycheck. And I realize that she realizes I'm gonna sue the university, but I would never do that. So a week later, I'm sitting in the office, and she says, so we decided, you know, Rick was upset for a second. He wrote some things on a website that he probably shouldn't have done, but. So we're not going to let him go. He needs this job. But if you really want him to be fired, and we will fire him. And I thought about it for a second, and I couldn't be the sort of person who fires someone and have me be the reason why someone is fired. So I said, I guess Rick can keep his job, because why would I fire someone who wants to kill me? Because he would kill me. So she says, okay, then we'll have Rick come in here and apologize. And I say, okay. So he comes in and he looks sad, and he starts to bawl and cry. And I'm just sitting there and I don't know what to do. And he says he's so sorry and he didn't mean it and he would have never done any of those things. And I said, yeah, and everyone knows now you would never get away with it. And I just stand up and I walk out of the office. Thank you.