I’ve been working on this huge and awful project at work right now. I’m reviewing accounts that are really, really horribly old. Between bureaucratic inertia and outright stupidity, our clients haven’t actually informed many of the customers that they owe them money. Well, I was working this account from several years ago, where our client had helpfully remembered to bill the customer. In this case, the customer had the fairly valid complaint that he never got the stuff we’re billing him for. Our client started the internal complaint process and… well, then it just stopped. Until they send the damned thing to us with a post-it note attached saying, “FIX IT.” Well, I looked at the account and noticed this guy was pretty old. So I thought to myself, “If he was old then, maybe he’s dead now.” Furthermore, I thought that it would be okay that he was dead, so I didn’t have to deal with this any further. I called up our skiptracing tool and found that, yep, he died shortly after filing the complaint. So I sent it on over to Legal.
Does this little episode, my wishing harm to a fellow human being so that I could be spared some trouble, make me a bad person?