You take the high road, I’ll take the low road

When I’m in confrontational situation, I often have the overwhelming urge to act like one of those dickheads on Border Security, Real Housewives of insert city here, or Kitchen Nightmares, where you’re delusional, unreasonable and, more often than not, drunk.

I’m about to execute an award-winning table flip

Witnessing poor Mr C deal with a difficult customer who decided to slag him and his business off on social media, when he’d merely done his job and even given the wally a discount, made me realise that doing the right thing really bites the big one.

Now Mr C is just about the most decent human being you could hope to meet – I have to continually spike his coffee to ensure he doesn’t realise I’m nowhere near as decent as him – so watching him cop the wrath of a very unfair and undeserved bout of digital feedback seemed more than unjust. I mean this person did not use punctuation or capital letters at all, so really has no right to even have a Facebook account, let alone dish out criticism willy nilly.

Mr C asked my opinion as a previous ‘expert’ (translation: semi-retired mediocre professional dabbler) in reputation management and social media. Seeing as the Neanderthal in question didn’t even use the correct business name initially (doing business with morons does pay off sometimes!), I told him it was probably best to just leave it alone or just take a gently gently approach and thank him for his feedback.

Meanwhile, devil Claire was hatching a plan to start up fake Facebook accounts to befriend this poo poo head and start posting some interesting photoshopped images to his pages – I’m friends with numerous graphic designers you see. I was also keen get my grubby little mitts on his email address and sign him up to a few hundred mailing lists and websites.

I’m still considering the mailing list/website thing because thinking about him dealing with the barrage of erectile dysfunction emails flooding his inbox each day and having to explain the Ashley Madison account to his wife makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

But why do we end up doing the right thing, when the wrong thing is so much more fun and probably deeply satisfying? Probably because most of us are decent human beings and know we’d be plagued by overwhelming guilt if we did take the low road. Oh to be a sociopath.

Taking the high road is so boring sometimes. It’s the salad and regular exercise of the ethical dilemma. Being a total arsehole looks like a crapload more fun.