Lea Cottier on Mike Rinder

“Mike Rinder, to me, was an arrogant bastard.” Lea describes how Rinder’s attitude toward others was belittling and “higher than thou.”

TRANSCRIPT:

Mike Rinder, to me, was an arrogant bastard, basically. Like, his care for staff was nonexistent and his own attitude of who he was, was very definitely a “higher than thou.” And, you know, like, he always seemed to look down at people and you could never do the right thing to him.

A stupid little piddly example was, one time when he comes in, I said, “Good morning, Sir. Nice shirt.” Simple, nice pleasant thing that you would say, and he looks down and then makes this stupid look on his face and says, “It’s a white shirt.” It’s as if everything kind of goes back in. You’re like, “Ooh, why did I say that?” or like, “I shouldn’t have spoken.” And every morning it was, “Good morning,” it was either no response, a grunt or like the white shirt kind of thing, of just a sneery remark, never a “Hi, how’s it going?” Nothing, never even a “Good morning.” It was always something belittling.

The main thing that I recall as being the most painful would be when we had staff meetings, which generally, they’re for—that’s when you get together and you coordinate and you’re—you let the crew know what you’re working on and make sure that, you know, everybody’s coordinated and knows what’s needed and wanted in order to get some production done. And he would always just be to the side, always reading something else, or like, very disassociated and not caring about what was happening until—there’s probably about two or three staff in particular that he really seemed to just hate, and whenever they went up to give their briefings, he would just needle them into jabbering idiots practically, or to tears.

He just didn’t like people. He didn’t, he didn’t care for people. He wasn’t there for people and he definitely wasn’t there to help make the organization go somewhere. He had his own, at least it felt like he had his own status—was more important than people and his job even, or the care of his staff.