Elaine Siegel on Mike Rinder

Mike Rinder was despicable. I mean he was very lazy, he would delegate a lot of his work to his juniors. I remember one time I was working with him and he was asleep at his desk. And then he kind of wakes up and he asked me if I had some coat or something I could give him to keep him warm. So I gave him my leather jacket so that he would stay warm so that he would be able to sleep. But he was sleeping a lot. Like he, we would see him sleeping at his desk.

He was very cold with people. Like I don’t remember one instance where he said something nice to somebody or about somebody or good about their work or their products, never validated the staff, nothing like this.

I remember when we were, we would have a meeting of the staff like at the, at the end of the week, we would have a weekly staff meeting and Mike would call people up and say things like, “You criminal.” Like, he would attack them. He really was oppressive when you look at, you know, oppressive or discriminatory people in the work environment, this is what Mike was, he was an oppressive person in the work environment.

Another time I remember where I was working on a project to do ads, and he came storming in. There was a staff member sitting next to me, we were working on these ads. He comes storming in the door with a pencil in his hand and he sticks the pencil one inch away from the guy’s eye and says, “I’m going to poke your eye out if you ever do that again.” And literally I was afraid he was going to do that. I stood up and I looked right at him and he looked at me and he stopped. But this guy could have lost his eye because of Mike Rinder. He was not someone that you could correct easily. He was not someone who would say, “Oh yeah, I made a mistake,” you know. Or he wouldn’t admit to errors that he made. He would always try to be the person that was the best or, you know, looked good. But it was all a pretense. It was all just phony. He was a fake guy.