Richard had joined a company in London as head of its Textile-Dyeing department, to replace someone who had not been making a very good job of it. He was delighted: he certainly hadn’t expected to be selected.

He enthusiastically got down to the business of reorganising and modernising everything from bottom to top. Better still, the staff liked him as well as approving of his innovations. As for the company director, he was pretty pleased with himself.

After a while though, Richard seemed to be feeling a mite touchy about the stock manager, Phil, who ran the offices on the floor below his. Phil was a large, amiable and energetic fellow, who would bound up the steps all day with swatches, charts, and textile rolls: he always had a friendly word for members of staff.

Richard was really puzzled by his reaction to Phil who, true, had been there for a lot longer than he of course, but his job wasn’t more important or significant. They were neither rivals nor competitors - nor even after the same girl! No; altogether Phil was the epitome of bonhomie and workplace cooperation. So he must have a dark side; something that only Richard had managed to spot. Richard set about trying to entice it out into the open by subtly bringing into play every social trick of the trade.

After weeks of concentrating on the task, he had come up with nothing! Then, out of the blue as they say - although it has a more thunderous sound than that - Richard was fired; in fact told by the boss to leave the building immediately, “without further embarrassment”.

Humiliatingly mulling it all over, he discovered that he was now purged of his hitherto lofty disapproval of, (or even revulsion at), the tactics, antics, power-positioning and so on, that he had witnessed often before. (But he wondered why had he picked on Phil……..was it the man’s sheer ‘likeability’ that irked him?)

Anyway; he couldn’t avoid that he had freely engaged in what he had most despised in others. This gruesome ‘flash-in-the-mirror’ had divested him of his eyebrow-lifting “surprise at the world and its behaviour”. He had seen himself in action!

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