Theresa Pratt on Mike Rinder

I knew Mike Rinder because I was his secretary for several years. For, I would say, about three years, and then I was his direct junior.

When I first started working with Mike Rinder, he, right off the bat, would give me a nickname. He gave me a nickname called “Spider Legs,” which I thought was a bit demeaning. Right, it was very sudden and I’m—you know, here’s a person of authority who, you know, has a lot of responsibility and is an executive and he’s kind of teasing you, but embarrassing me.

There was one girl that worked in our office and she was, she was beautiful. She was Mexican, dark eyes, you know, very pretty girl. Very nice girl to work with and he called her “the Vampire.” And I was a bit surprised, I’m like, where did he get that idea? But, he thought that was quite funny.

I honestly don’t remember seeing him working as such. Like he’d be at his desk working with papers, typing things up, that type of thing. But as far as working, or like working out—I mean we dealt with so many different things in PR, right? We did publications, we did planning, campaigns. His juniors worked a lot. They’d put together the research, put the—you know, the plans together, design the publications. They worked, they’d get things to him. The problem was not getting it through him or getting anything okayed, because there was always something he could find that was a problem.

There was one thing I worked on for at least six months that was very, very vital for an external campaign. I don’t think it ever was passed on and I must have—I don’t know how many times I sent it to him. But he’d constantly send it back for things that were just inconsequential, but never passed on.

Another one was one day, we’d just finished doing a whole publication that was, you know, we’d worked several weeks at, and everybody was going out to celebrate, basically, ’cause we’d, you know, worked hard and it was pretty exciting. But he called me up to his office before going. There was some submission that I put together for him to look at, like some documentation, some binders, right. And I was sitting there and he just took it and he threw it at me and threw it on the floor and just was screaming how he thought it was terrible. And then told me I could leave. So I thought, “Wow, this is kind of scary.”

In working with Mike Rinder, I experienced several violent instances with me directly. Yeah. One of them, we were working on a publication. And I happened to come in to the office at about—I was gone for a couple hours doing something and I came back. And he, he was in this office and he came running across, from one end of the office all the way to me with his fist. And he was about to hit me. Luckily there was a man behind him who grabbed him back and stopped him, right? But his fist was heading for my face. I think he was about two inches away from me.

Then another time where he threw a phone at me. He apparently was looking for me during my lunchtime. I didn’t know. So I got into my office and he asked me, “Where the ,” you know, “were you?” And I said, “Oh, you know, I was working in the conference room.” And he threw a phone at me and then he punched the desk so hard that the computer terminal broke.

So that caused me a bit of fear because I thought, if he’s going to throw a phone at me—he missed. But then when he punched the computer and the computer broke, of course I was also his secretary at the time, so I had to get them both replaced, pretty rapidly.

I’ve never worked with anybody like Mike Rinder. I mean, on the record, I’ve been around for a very long time. With that kind of temper or anything like that, he is one of a kind.