June 5, 2025 • 38 mins
After losing his job, an ex-Disney employee tried to get his former employer's attention by hacking in and making strange updates to company files.
Sources:
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/69534211/united-states-v-scheuer/
https://www.eeoc.gov/what-you-can-expect-after-you-file-charge
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/26/us/disney-worker-prison-hacking.html
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Coo Zone Media. In June of twenty twenty four, Michael
Schuyer had a disagreement with a coworker. It isn't clear
from the court records, so I couldn't tell you exactly
what was said. He says there was a difference of
opinion over a workplace matter. But he's in federal prison
(00:25):
and two of his coworkers now have restraining orders against him,
So I'm inclined to believe there may be more to
the story than that. But that's all we know. That
minor workplace disagreement ruined Michael Schuer's life. Losing his job
was not only financially devastating, it was the death of
his lifelong dream of working for the Walt Disney Corporation.
(00:49):
And losing a job is never easy. It's a crushing blow.
You have to figure out how you're going to pay
the rent, how you're going to get healthcare, how you're
going to find new job. I can't speak for everybody,
but I think I'm not alone in saying that it's
also embarrassing. It hurts your feelings, your ego takes a
(01:10):
real hit, and for some people that just isn't something
they can move on from I'm Molly Conger, and this
is weird, little guys, This is kind of a silly one.
(01:43):
Nobody gets hurt, nobody dies, nothing really bad actually happened.
I know. I said last week that I ended up
with the episode that came out because I was reaching
around for something quick, because the story I was trying
trying to write just felt unwieldy and I was having
trouble forcing it into the right shape. Well that's where
(02:07):
we still are this week. I'm still really fighting with
something I think is going to take a few more
weeks to hammer out into any kind of actual narrative.
So here we are again at the eleventh hour, and
I have nothing but a few dozen pages of odds
and ends about a story that spans fifty years, and
so I'm scrounging around for something else. I'm not asking
(02:30):
for your sympathy for anything. You probably have a real
job where you make something or help people, and my
job is just telling you a horrible little story. But
all I can tell you is the truth, and the
truth is sometimes I have no idea how I'm going
to force any more words out of my brain and
into this microphone. So all I've got this week is
(02:52):
Michael Schueer, And like I said, he didn't really hurt anybody.
He wasn't a member of any hate groups. As far
as I can tell, until last summer, he had no
history of any criminal conduct. I couldn't find so much
as a speeding ticket. He was squeaky clean. He was
(03:13):
a family man, married for nearly ten years, and the
father of three young children. But the course of action
he decided on after he got fired last summer is
what makes him a weird little guy. And I think
he's actually a tiny example of one of the emerging
weird little guy archetypes. I don't have a name for
(03:35):
it yet. I don't really have the weird little guy
taxonomy mapped out, but patterns are starting to appear in
these stories. There are distinct types of weird little guy,
and one of them is a kind of guy who
can't accept when he's wrong. More importantly, he can't accept
(03:57):
being wronged. And God help you if you have even
a passing encounter with this kind of guy. For some
of them, the perceived slight is so minor that it's
not something I think I would ever think about again,
let alone devote the rest of my life to getting
revenge over it. If you've listened to the whole catalog
(04:21):
of this show, you've heard about some of these guys
I'm thinking about, people like Frank Sweeney from the pair
of episodes back in September. Frank was a lifelong neo Nazi, sure,
but mostly he was a con man. He ended up
in prison a couple of times for little frauds and cons,
(04:42):
things like putting ads in gun magazines for fancy guns
that he didn't actually own, and then accepting numerous buyers
money for these imaginary collector's items. Later in his life,
he cut the tails off of stray cats and sold
them to gullible people who thought they were buying fancy,
purebread hale as cats. He conned the FBI, the CIA,
(05:04):
the DOJ, and the Witness Protection Program into thinking that
he was helping them to apprehend an escaped Soviet spy
that he'd befriended in prison. He once tricked a mob
lawyer into flying him across the country and putting him
up in a nice hotel in exchange for testimony about
a Chicago mob boss he'd once shared a cell with.
He loved to lie, but more than that, I think
(05:29):
the defining characteristic of a guy like Frank Sweeney is
his sense of self righteous indignation. When he felt like
someone had wronged him, he made it his life's work
to get back at them, to hurt them back the
way they'd hurt him, and he did it in some
(05:50):
really bizarre ways. In the early nineties, when he was
living in an apartment in New Jersey, a family with
children moved into a neighboring apartment, and once he decided
that the neighbors were intentionally disregarding his request to keep
their children quiet, he made it his life's mission to
destroy the entire family. He spread rumors that the father
(06:14):
had HIV and that he'd given it to his children.
He shut off their power at random. He filled the
lock on their front door with staples so they couldn't
get into their home. He had their mail routed to
a random address in Iowa. And he subscribed to their
nine year old son to pornographic magazines. And that's unhinged behavior.
(06:36):
That is an unnecessary escalation to the problem of a
noisy fourth grader. And it was all because he felt
entitled to complete silence in his apartment and total obedience
from his neighbors, and two decades after that, when he
was already a very old man, the stranger made a
(06:57):
passing comment about how he'd parked his car at the
post parking lot, and instead of just letting it go,
like almost anyone else on earth would, he spent three
years stalking that woman and her entire family, sending them
threatening postcards, spreading rumors that they'd engaged in sexually deviant behavior,
(07:19):
that they were drug addicts and criminals, and they were
doing tax fraud. Three years because she commented on how
he had parked his car. And then there was Walter
Fitzpatrick from those episodes back in November. He was the
sovereign citizen who tried to citizens arrest an entire courthouse
(07:40):
in rural Tennessee because they wouldn't help him indict President
Barack Obama for treason. And Walter Fitzpatrick had a long
history of this kind of grievance motivated behavior. He'd been
banned from his congressman's office after the receptionist had to
get a restraining order against him because he refused to
accept that they just couldn't help him get a new trial.
(08:03):
In his Navy court martial. And then there are the
weird little guys who try to use the courts to
get their revenge, becoming vexatious litigants, filing lawsuit after lawsuit
against anyone who says no to them. Guys like Robert
Moller from a few weeks ago, the one time arms
dealer who shipped hundreds of guns to Neo Nazis in
(08:23):
South Africa. In his quieter older years, he seems to
work out his anger by filing a constant stream of
nuisance lawsuits. He filed a lawsuit against the hospital that
didn't perform his elective surgery at the exact time they'd
scheduled it. For lawsuits against the guys from the table
tennis club who asked him to stop coming around because
(08:45):
his behavior was frightening. A lawsuit against the state because
he didn't think it was fair that he got a
traffic ticket. A lawsuit against a restaurant for asking him
not to let his dog touch the food on the buffet.
Like I said, I'm still working on the taxonomy here,
but I think these are all, to some degree, the
(09:06):
same kind of guy. The common denominator is that they
can't handle discomfort. They can't handle someone telling them no.
They can't handle being wrong, they can't handle not being
the protagonist of reality. This is their story and we're
just the characters in it. We're supposed to behave the
(09:29):
way he wants us to, and if we don't, his
reaction is not going to be normal. And that's the
mold that I think Michael Schuer fits into. He isn't,
all things considered, really the kind of guy I'm interested in.
(09:49):
This isn't the kind of story I would normally choose
for an episode of this show, because, like I said,
he wasn't in any kind of hate group and he
didn't hurt any But I am interested in this kind
of guy, the kind of guy whose reaction to a
pretty normal life event is decidedly not normal at all.
(10:14):
The kind of guy who showed no other outward signs
of being violent or hateful, but when confronted with an obstacle,
suddenly reveals a previously hidden and very peculiar interest in
mass shootings and swastikas. But I guess we should start
(10:34):
at the beginning. Michael Scheuer loved Disney. It had always
been his dream to work for the company after graduating
from Kent State in Ohio. He moved to Orlando to
try to get us foot in the door. He started
as a janitor and worked his way up, and on
this front, I guess you do have to hand it
(10:56):
to him, it looks like he did the work. He
had a dream and he did the work to try
to make it come true. He had a college degree,
but he was willing to take an entry level job
making up trash at a theme park if that's what
it took to be close to Mickey Mouse. He continued
working at Disney while he earned his business degree, and
(11:19):
slowly but surely, he worked his way up from groundskeeper
to cast member and eventually got an office job at Disney.
By twenty eighteen, he was working as a financial systems
analyst when COVID hit. His job was one of many
that were cut by the company, and he spent the
year that he was laid off trying anything he could
(11:40):
to get back in and he was eventually rehired as
part of the team doing technical support for computers installed
on Disney cruise ships, and in twenty twenty four he
was working on the team tasked with designing and updating
the menus and menu signs used at Disney theme parks
and resorts. In twenty twenty four, Michael Schuer's wife gave
(12:02):
birth to their third child. I don't know if Michael
Scheuer took advantage of the full eight weeks of paternity
leave that Disney claims to offer, but I do know
that he took paternity leave because it was just a
few days after returning from that leave in June of
twenty twenty four that the incident took place. What exactly
(12:24):
happened is in dispute. According to his defense attorney, his
version of events is this quote. Shortly after returning to work,
mister Schuyer voiced a difference of opinion to his supervisor
about a new process of menu creation. He believed his
team agreed with him, but his supervisor did not. He
(12:48):
met with his supervisor and a disagreement occurred. Mister Schuyer
had a panic attack during the meeting. The next supervisor
up the chain of command stated to mister Schuyer that
he did not threaten his supervisor, but that mister Scheuer
was going to be suspended. A sworn statement from the
supervisor in question, though, reads in June twenty twenty four,
(13:11):
Michael Scheuer was terminated from employment due to misconduct against
me in which he threatened me at work, and the
government was prepared to present to witness who would testify
that his behavior had been aggressive and threatening in the
meeting that led to his termination. And maybe that comes
down to semantics. Maybe she perceived his conduct as threatening
(13:34):
without him actually making a direct threat. That is technically
different in the eyes of the law. But I think
any reasonable person can understand that if you make your
supervisor feel like she is in danger, you might get fired.
(14:07):
He was initially just sent home and suspended, but after
he sent an email to human resources described only as
quote twenty four questions pertaining to the suspension, which I'm
sure had a very normal tone, the decision was made
to terminate his employment with Disney. And this is the
(14:28):
point at which he crossed the weird little guy rubicon.
He was upset. It wasn't fair. This was his dream.
He loved Disney, he loved working for Disney, and he
needed that job. He needed the health insurance, he had
a family to take care of. For God's sake, they
just didn't understand. If they would have heard him out,
(14:50):
they would understand that they were wrong to fire him,
but they wouldn't take his calls. He claims that he
was unable to find an employment lawyer willing to take
his case. He says he quote filed a complaint with
the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission but did not get
a quick response. He felt isolated and depressed. He did
(15:13):
not understand why nobody would speak with him. And this
is the explanation his attorney offered for what happened next quote,
he turned to what he thought would get Disney to
respond to him. I'm not an expert in employment law,
but I did look up how long it usually takes
(15:34):
to get a response from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission
if you file a complaint online, The law says they
have ten days to send notice of the complaint to
your former employer, and then once they do that, the
employer has thirty days from that date to respond to it.
The average complaint takes about ten months to resolve start
(15:55):
to finish. But he didn't even wait thirty days before
he decided to change tactics. He started trying to get
Disney's attention his own way less than three weeks after
he was fired, and so you might be thinking, oh,
he probably sent some weird emails to his former coworkers, right,
(16:17):
Maybe he started showing up outside the office or making
a lot of phone calls. And those are all reasonable guesses.
Those are things you might do if your stated goal
was to get someone's attention. No, what he decided to
do is much weirder, and honestly, I don't understand why
(16:40):
he thinks we would believe his claim that this was
the only thing he could think of that would get
them to call him again. From his lawyer quote, he
started altering Disney's menus to try to get their attention
and respond to him. Now, remember that was his job
before he was fired. He worked on the team responsible
(17:03):
for designing, editing, and updating the files used to print
the menus at restaurants and cafes at Disney parks and hotels.
Once the files were approved by the team at Disney,
the physical menus were printed by a Minnesota based print
and marketing company called Tailor Corporation. Just a few weeks
after being fired, Scheyer logged into the online application used
(17:26):
by the print company to manage the menu files. A
lot of the news coverage about this case refers to
what he did as hacking, in which I didn't realize
is technically the correct word for what happened. Hacking doesn't
necessarily require any particular set of skills or you know,
it's not like a nineties movie where they're tippy tapping
(17:47):
on the keyboard as all the numbers flash on the screen. No,
it just means any unauthorized access to a computer device
or network. And he definitely was not authorized to be
logging in. But the company had actually just forgotten to
change the password to the administrative account, and once he
logged into that administrator's account, he created a new employee
(18:11):
profile for himself using a fake name, and then using
that account with a fake name, he logged in and
he went to town. He replaced all of the font
files for all of the menus in the system, and
this sounds like hell. He didn't just change the fonts
(18:32):
that were used in the text of the menus. He
changed the source files for all of the fonts in
every menu, so all of the names of the fonts
still appeared to be correct, but those names were now
connected to a corresponding file for a different font, and
(18:53):
he changed most of those fonts to wing dings the
font that's just weird little symbols. And because he'd altered
the files themselves, the system then started pushing out this
change to every single one of the thousands of files
ever uploaded to this system, and this rendered the entire
(19:14):
application completely useless for at least a week. And so
because this took the entire system offline and rendered every
single file useless, obviously they noticed this immediately. Disney pretty
quickly tracked down the source of the problem and they
changed all the passwords so this couldn't happen again. But
(19:35):
that didn't really stop him. So now that one avenue
had been closed off, he just moved to a different strategy.
If he couldn't log in, he would make sure no
one else could either. He started small targeting those immediate supervisors,
the ones who'd fired him, and he used their log
in names and entered random, incorrect passwords. These repeated bad
(20:01):
attempts to access the system, which would then trigger the
accounts to be locked out. At first, he was just
doing this manually, so you have to imagine him sitting
alone at his computer while his chronically ill wife is
trying to take care of their three young children, one
of whom is a newborn baby, and he's just sitting
there at his computer again and again and again, typing
(20:24):
in a random keyboard smash password and hitting enter over
it over and over again so that his old boss
can't access her email. Throughout August and September of twenty
twenty four, these attacks escalated, and he eventually wrote a
script to automate the process of making these thousands and
thousands of login attempts. On one day alone, he made
(20:49):
eight thousand login attempts across accounts belonging to the four
people that he thought were responsible for firing him, and
he eventually branched out to fourteen day for An accounts,
all of which belonged to members of the team he'd
worked on before he was fired. Over the course of
about a month, he made one hundred thousand log in attempts,
(21:12):
locking these employees out of their accounts for days at
a time. And around the same time he's ramping up
these attacks on his former coworkers accounts, he found a
new way to mess with the menus Disney had changed
all of the passwords, so he couldn't access the application
that was used by the Disney production team anymore. But
(21:32):
the company that actually prints the finished menu files had
their own system. All finished menu files had to be
uploaded to the print company through a secure file transfer protocol.
So he made his own menu files and uploaded them
directly to the printer. His initial attempt to get Disney's
(21:55):
attention had made the menus unusable. They had nonsense fonts,
they would load the image files, or they just came
up as blank pages, so everyone noticed this. This was
a very obvious attempt, But this time around he was
a lot more subtle. If you're just looking quickly at
these files, you wouldn't notice there was anything wrong. Honestly,
(22:18):
they might have even made it all the way through
a proofreading process if you weren't being really meticulous. Because
he's just changing individual words. He's changing the prices by
a dollar or two. He removed an asterisk, he changed
the QR codes. They're just little changes, almost like maybe
he didn't want them to notice this time, And honestly,
(22:43):
some of them are kind of funny. I mean, overall, yes,
this is a bad situation. He should not have done
any of this, But if he'd just stuck with immature
little jokes, the whole story would have a really different tone,
because it's hard to be mad about stuff like changing
cheesy grits to cheesy shits on the menu for a
(23:06):
cafe at Disney's old Key West resort, or changing shellfish
to hellfish, or changing the description of an English breakfast
tea from a psalm tea to just ass tea. Is
a little bit funny. I'm not mad imagining an old
couple in Key West seeing cheesy shits on their menu.
(23:26):
It's whatever. But unfortunately, most of the changes were not
funny swear words. Most of the changes were modifications to
the allergen information on menu items across multiple dining locations,
removing alerts on menu items that contained potentially fatal food
allergens like peanuts. On other menus, he altered the region
(23:49):
listed for wine selections. That one sounds mostly harmless to me.
Not a wine snob, so I don't really care where
the grapes were grown. I'm not going to pretend I
can taste the difference. But he swapped out the actual
locations for places where well known mass shootings have occurred.
In one case, the shooting had been painfully recent. He
(24:13):
swapped out Willamette Valley. On one wine for Appalachi High
an unmistakable reference to a school shooting in Georgia that
it only just happened the week that he did that.
On another menu, he uploaded a small image of a swastika.
(24:45):
He would later claim that he never actually intended for
any of these altered files to get printed. He said
that he knew Disney employees reviewed every file and that
they would catch the alterations before they went to the printer.
He wasn't actually trying to poison any children with peanut allergies.
He just wanted Disney to call him. He didn't want
(25:08):
these menus to end up in anyone's hands. He just
wanted attention. But that claim falls apart. By the time
he switched to a new mode of attack, he uploaded
altered files directly into the server that functioned as the
print queue for the company that printed the menus. So
by that point in the process, the printer is receiving
(25:30):
what they believe to be a file that has been
proofed and approved and is ready to print. And they did,
in fact print thousands of these altered menus and signs.
Although by the time they did print these the investigation
was coming to an end, and the affected items were
destroyed before they were shipped out, and he wasn't hard
(25:52):
to catch. Immediately after the initial unauthorized access was detected,
Disney launched an internal investigation. Multiple employees interviewed during this
process brought up the fact that Michael Scheuer had just
been fired. Further investigation showed the attacks had all been
made by someone using a VPN to mask their IP address,
(26:17):
but when they looked further back into company logs, they
found that before he was fired, Michael Scheuer had accessed
his work email from home, and when he did that,
he had his VPN on, so he managed to mask
the true IP address of his home computer, but because
he used the same VPN throughout, he was still using
(26:38):
an IP address that was provably connected to him. On
September twenty third, twenty twenty four, multiple members of the
menu production team were locked out of their accounts again.
Someone was making hundreds and hundreds of attempts to access
their accounts using incorrect passwords. At twelve forty one pm
(27:01):
that afternoon, FBI agents knocked on Michael Schuer's front door.
They had a warrant to search his home and seize
his computers. At twelve forty six pm, the wave of
login attempts suddenly stopped and it never started again. Two
minutes after that, Michael Schuyer answered his front door. He
(27:27):
claimed he was surprised to see the FBI there, but
he made a strange comment that he wouldn't have been
surprised if it was the local sheriff there to tell
him to stop sending emails that might be interpreted as threatening.
I have no idea what that means. That never comes
up again. He told the FBI agents that sure, he
(27:49):
definitely used his home computer to access systems related to
his job when he still worked there, and maybe he
logged into some work related stuff after he was fired,
just to get his old pays st ubs, things like that,
but he couldn't think of any reason why they'd be
there asking him questions like that, And when they explained
to him why they were there and what they were investigating,
(28:13):
the outright denied having done anything of the sort. And
then he speculated that maybe Disney was framing him because
they were worried about him. The FBI took his computers
with him that day, but they didn't make an arrest.
A few days later, Michael Scheuer hired an attorney and
(28:34):
checked himself into an impatient mental health facility. Meanwhile, the
FBI was still building their case against him, including getting
a search warrant for his Google account. Then, on October
twenty second, twenty twenty four, a month after they searched
his house, Michael Schuer received an automated notice from Google
(28:54):
that they'd been served with a warrant for his account
and they would be complying with the order to turn
over him account information. Now, I imagine that's a really
scary email to get. I'm not sure what my initial
reaction would be in that situation. The right answer if
this happens to you is to call a lawyer. The
(29:15):
extremely wrong answer is to then type please explain this
to me at the top of the email, and then
forward that email to the FBI agent who was just
at your house, and then follow that up with another
email the next day demanding that the agent loop in
the victim of the crime on the conversation so you
(29:36):
can get some answers about what's going on here. Perhaps
an even worse course of action in this situation would
be to then drive to your former boss's house in
the middle of the night and stand on his front
porch making a thumbs up at his security camera, and
then just walking away. It's hard to say what you
would do in a stressful situation that you have never
(29:58):
experienced before. I don't want a Monday morning quarterback here.
I like to think that I would just call a lawyer.
I don't think that I would do all that other stuff.
But that is what Michael Scheyer did. The day after
he paid that ominous visit to his former supervisor, the
FBI rode up and filed the criminal complaint. Whatever timeline
(30:22):
they'd had in mind was irrelevant. Now this guy was
behaving unpredictably and they needed to go ahead and make
the arrest, probably in large part because he made that
strange nighttime visit to his former boss's house and then
the subsequent restraining orders granted to two of his former supervisors.
He was held without bond. After two months in jail,
(30:45):
he entered a plea agreement. He pled guilty to computer
hacking and identity theft, and was sentenced to thirty six
months in prison during the three year period of supervised release.
After he gets out. He's not allowed to have any
contact with any of his victims. So that's those fourteen
co workers and the Disney Corporation in the grand scheme
(31:09):
of weird little guys. This is all pretty minor. Nobody
really got hurt. It cost about one hundred and fifty
thousand dollars to reprint the affected materials, and Disney estimates
that the ordeal cost them about six hundred thousand dollars
in total. I have to admit I don't particularly care
if the Walt Disney Corporation lost half a million dollars.
(31:32):
If the alterations hadn't been caught and those menus had
been sent out to the restaurants, someone could have gotten
seriously hurt. But they didn't, and according to Michael Schouer,
he knew they wouldn't. I don't know that that's true.
It's impossible to say at this point. But again, in
(31:52):
the end, nothing really happened, did it. I initially came
across this case during my regular search for newly filed
cases containing certain keywords I like to look for. I
think in this case it was the word swastika. But
I don't actually really think that this guy's a Nazi.
(32:15):
I don't have any other evidence that points to that
swastika being a larger part of his life. When the
FBI came and took his computer away, there was a
file on his desktop called swastika dot png. He must
have googled the word swastika and then saved the image
that he wanted to use on the menu. It kind
(32:36):
of reminds me of early four chan culture. I don't
mean the four Chan of today. I mean way back
in the day before those guys were genuinely sincere neo
Nazis and mass murder enthusiasts. A lot of them were
just shit talking. They wanted to be extreme, they wanted
to be edgy. They wanted to post the most shocking,
fucked up stuff they could think of because that was
(32:58):
funny or thrilling or interesting. I guess so, I'm inclined
to believe he put the swastika on the menu because
it was the worst thing he could think of, not
because he actually liked it. I mean, I hope that's
the case. I'm a little less generous when it comes
(33:19):
to the mass shooting thing, though. That's odd to me.
That feels like a manifestation of some nascent interest. I
don't know that that's something that would come immediately to
mind if you're just trolling and you have no existing
preoccupation with mass shootings. You know. But that's just my gut.
There's no evidence of anything at all about his motivations.
(33:44):
This is the only thing he ever did. He crashed
out at work, and it sent him into a tailspin
that ended in federal prison. The only glimpse into Michael
Schuer's motivation that I can offer you is this Reddit
post he made just a few days before the FBI
showed up at his house for the first time. On
a subreddit for people with social anxiety. He made a
(34:05):
post with the title reaching the end question mark. It's long,
but it reads in part, the people involved in firing
me treated me like a criminal, me who is afraid
of everyone and just wants to blend into the background.
I was blown away how absolutely nobody cared about me.
(34:27):
Not one person from work reached out to check on me.
I'm sure part of the reason is because I'm a
man and everyone just assumed I don't need anyone. Maybe
the other part is because I'm an awkward asshole. I
have no friends, no work connections, nothing I've already determined
I will never work again. Nobody cares about me. He
(34:50):
goes on to say that he started therapy earlier that year,
but when he got fired, he realized it was too late,
too late for what is unclear, too late to change,
too late to make anything of his life. It has
a vaguely suicidal tone, but he doesn't actually express a
desire to harm himself. On the contrary, he seems fixated
(35:14):
on harming others, writing quote, every day since I was fired,
I sit around fuming, planning revenge because I feel so wronged.
But then I remember, maybe they aren't the problem. Maybe
it's me. I've always been afraid of everybody, but it's
everybody that's been afraid of me. And there it is,
(35:37):
isn't it. He said it himself because I feel so wronged.
It's remarkably self aware. It reminds me a lot of
what Frank Sweeney said when the cops finally searched his
house and discovered he'd been the one sending those threatening
postcards all those years. He just didmitted it. He said
(36:02):
that woman in the parking lot had made him feel embarrassed,
and it made him feel better to know that he
was causing her distress and return. Being a weird little
guy is something that exists on a spectrum. I think
some of them are truly monsters. They kill, name, torture,
(36:23):
and terrorize. They carry out mass shootings and blow up
synagogues and daycares. They're trying to start a race war,
they want to barricade themselves on a compound and shoot
it out with the police, or they just want to
gain enough political power to punish their enemies. Those are
the guys I was thinking about when I started the show.
But there are weird little guys out there who are
(36:45):
much much littler, guys whose behavior fits the archetype but
only registers a little blit on the radar. And those
are the kinds of guys you're most likely to meet
one day, God willing, most of us will never meet
a mass shooter, but you probably will eventually encounter the
(37:06):
kind of guy who just can't take no for an answer,
so he puts a swastika on the menu at the
Mickey Mouse Cafe. Weird Little Guys is a production of
(37:30):
cools On Media and iHeartRadio. It's research, written and recorded
by me Molly Conger Our Executive producers are Sophie Linterman
and Mabert Evans. The show is edited by the wildly
talented Mary Gagan. The theme music was composed by Brad Dickert.
You can email me a Weird Little Guys podcast at
gmail dot com. I will definitely read it, but I
probably won't answer it. It's nothing personal. You can exchange
(37:50):
conspiracy theories about the show with other listeners on the
Weird Little Guy subreddit. Just don't boast anything that's going
to make you one of my weird Little Guys.
Coo Zone Media. In June of twenty twenty four, Michael
Schuyer had a disagreement with a coworker. It isn't clear
from the court records, so I couldn't tell you exactly
what was said. He says there was a difference of
opinion over a workplace matter. But he's in federal prison
(00:25):
and two of his coworkers now have restraining orders against him,
So I'm inclined to believe there may be more to
the story than that. But that's all we know. That
minor workplace disagreement ruined Michael Schuer's life. Losing his job
was not only financially devastating, it was the death of
his lifelong dream of working for the Walt Disney Corporation.
(00:49):
And losing a job is never easy. It's a crushing blow.
You have to figure out how you're going to pay
the rent, how you're going to get healthcare, how you're
going to find new job. I can't speak for everybody,
but I think I'm not alone in saying that it's
also embarrassing. It hurts your feelings, your ego takes a
(01:10):
real hit, and for some people that just isn't something
they can move on from I'm Molly Conger, and this
is weird, little guys, This is kind of a silly one.
(01:43):
Nobody gets hurt, nobody dies, nothing really bad actually happened.
I know. I said last week that I ended up
with the episode that came out because I was reaching
around for something quick, because the story I was trying
trying to write just felt unwieldy and I was having
trouble forcing it into the right shape. Well that's where
(02:07):
we still are this week. I'm still really fighting with
something I think is going to take a few more
weeks to hammer out into any kind of actual narrative.
So here we are again at the eleventh hour, and
I have nothing but a few dozen pages of odds
and ends about a story that spans fifty years, and
so I'm scrounging around for something else. I'm not asking
(02:30):
for your sympathy for anything. You probably have a real
job where you make something or help people, and my
job is just telling you a horrible little story. But
all I can tell you is the truth, and the
truth is sometimes I have no idea how I'm going
to force any more words out of my brain and
into this microphone. So all I've got this week is
(02:52):
Michael Schueer, And like I said, he didn't really hurt anybody.
He wasn't a member of any hate groups. As far
as I can tell, until last summer, he had no
history of any criminal conduct. I couldn't find so much
as a speeding ticket. He was squeaky clean. He was
(03:13):
a family man, married for nearly ten years, and the
father of three young children. But the course of action
he decided on after he got fired last summer is
what makes him a weird little guy. And I think
he's actually a tiny example of one of the emerging
weird little guy archetypes. I don't have a name for
(03:35):
it yet. I don't really have the weird little guy
taxonomy mapped out, but patterns are starting to appear in
these stories. There are distinct types of weird little guy,
and one of them is a kind of guy who
can't accept when he's wrong. More importantly, he can't accept
(03:57):
being wronged. And God help you if you have even
a passing encounter with this kind of guy. For some
of them, the perceived slight is so minor that it's
not something I think I would ever think about again,
let alone devote the rest of my life to getting
revenge over it. If you've listened to the whole catalog
(04:21):
of this show, you've heard about some of these guys
I'm thinking about, people like Frank Sweeney from the pair
of episodes back in September. Frank was a lifelong neo Nazi, sure,
but mostly he was a con man. He ended up
in prison a couple of times for little frauds and cons,
(04:42):
things like putting ads in gun magazines for fancy guns
that he didn't actually own, and then accepting numerous buyers
money for these imaginary collector's items. Later in his life,
he cut the tails off of stray cats and sold
them to gullible people who thought they were buying fancy,
purebread hale as cats. He conned the FBI, the CIA,
(05:04):
the DOJ, and the Witness Protection Program into thinking that
he was helping them to apprehend an escaped Soviet spy
that he'd befriended in prison. He once tricked a mob
lawyer into flying him across the country and putting him
up in a nice hotel in exchange for testimony about
a Chicago mob boss he'd once shared a cell with.
He loved to lie, but more than that, I think
(05:29):
the defining characteristic of a guy like Frank Sweeney is
his sense of self righteous indignation. When he felt like
someone had wronged him, he made it his life's work
to get back at them, to hurt them back the
way they'd hurt him, and he did it in some
(05:50):
really bizarre ways. In the early nineties, when he was
living in an apartment in New Jersey, a family with
children moved into a neighboring apartment, and once he decided
that the neighbors were intentionally disregarding his request to keep
their children quiet, he made it his life's mission to
destroy the entire family. He spread rumors that the father
(06:14):
had HIV and that he'd given it to his children.
He shut off their power at random. He filled the
lock on their front door with staples so they couldn't
get into their home. He had their mail routed to
a random address in Iowa. And he subscribed to their
nine year old son to pornographic magazines. And that's unhinged behavior.
(06:36):
That is an unnecessary escalation to the problem of a
noisy fourth grader. And it was all because he felt
entitled to complete silence in his apartment and total obedience
from his neighbors, and two decades after that, when he
was already a very old man, the stranger made a
(06:57):
passing comment about how he'd parked his car at the
post parking lot, and instead of just letting it go,
like almost anyone else on earth would, he spent three
years stalking that woman and her entire family, sending them
threatening postcards, spreading rumors that they'd engaged in sexually deviant behavior,
(07:19):
that they were drug addicts and criminals, and they were
doing tax fraud. Three years because she commented on how
he had parked his car. And then there was Walter
Fitzpatrick from those episodes back in November. He was the
sovereign citizen who tried to citizens arrest an entire courthouse
(07:40):
in rural Tennessee because they wouldn't help him indict President
Barack Obama for treason. And Walter Fitzpatrick had a long
history of this kind of grievance motivated behavior. He'd been
banned from his congressman's office after the receptionist had to
get a restraining order against him because he refused to
accept that they just couldn't help him get a new trial.
(08:03):
In his Navy court martial. And then there are the
weird little guys who try to use the courts to
get their revenge, becoming vexatious litigants, filing lawsuit after lawsuit
against anyone who says no to them. Guys like Robert
Moller from a few weeks ago, the one time arms
dealer who shipped hundreds of guns to Neo Nazis in
(08:23):
South Africa. In his quieter older years, he seems to
work out his anger by filing a constant stream of
nuisance lawsuits. He filed a lawsuit against the hospital that
didn't perform his elective surgery at the exact time they'd
scheduled it. For lawsuits against the guys from the table
tennis club who asked him to stop coming around because
(08:45):
his behavior was frightening. A lawsuit against the state because
he didn't think it was fair that he got a
traffic ticket. A lawsuit against a restaurant for asking him
not to let his dog touch the food on the buffet.
Like I said, I'm still working on the taxonomy here,
but I think these are all, to some degree, the
(09:06):
same kind of guy. The common denominator is that they
can't handle discomfort. They can't handle someone telling them no.
They can't handle being wrong, they can't handle not being
the protagonist of reality. This is their story and we're
just the characters in it. We're supposed to behave the
(09:29):
way he wants us to, and if we don't, his
reaction is not going to be normal. And that's the
mold that I think Michael Schuer fits into. He isn't,
all things considered, really the kind of guy I'm interested in.
(09:49):
This isn't the kind of story I would normally choose
for an episode of this show, because, like I said,
he wasn't in any kind of hate group and he
didn't hurt any But I am interested in this kind
of guy, the kind of guy whose reaction to a
pretty normal life event is decidedly not normal at all.
(10:14):
The kind of guy who showed no other outward signs
of being violent or hateful, but when confronted with an obstacle,
suddenly reveals a previously hidden and very peculiar interest in
mass shootings and swastikas. But I guess we should start
(10:34):
at the beginning. Michael Scheuer loved Disney. It had always
been his dream to work for the company after graduating
from Kent State in Ohio. He moved to Orlando to
try to get us foot in the door. He started
as a janitor and worked his way up, and on
this front, I guess you do have to hand it
(10:56):
to him, it looks like he did the work. He
had a dream and he did the work to try
to make it come true. He had a college degree,
but he was willing to take an entry level job
making up trash at a theme park if that's what
it took to be close to Mickey Mouse. He continued
working at Disney while he earned his business degree, and
(11:19):
slowly but surely, he worked his way up from groundskeeper
to cast member and eventually got an office job at Disney.
By twenty eighteen, he was working as a financial systems
analyst when COVID hit. His job was one of many
that were cut by the company, and he spent the
year that he was laid off trying anything he could
(11:40):
to get back in and he was eventually rehired as
part of the team doing technical support for computers installed
on Disney cruise ships, and in twenty twenty four he
was working on the team tasked with designing and updating
the menus and menu signs used at Disney theme parks
and resorts. In twenty twenty four, Michael Schuer's wife gave
(12:02):
birth to their third child. I don't know if Michael
Scheuer took advantage of the full eight weeks of paternity
leave that Disney claims to offer, but I do know
that he took paternity leave because it was just a
few days after returning from that leave in June of
twenty twenty four that the incident took place. What exactly
(12:24):
happened is in dispute. According to his defense attorney, his
version of events is this quote. Shortly after returning to work,
mister Schuyer voiced a difference of opinion to his supervisor
about a new process of menu creation. He believed his
team agreed with him, but his supervisor did not. He
(12:48):
met with his supervisor and a disagreement occurred. Mister Schuyer
had a panic attack during the meeting. The next supervisor
up the chain of command stated to mister Schuyer that
he did not threaten his supervisor, but that mister Scheuer
was going to be suspended. A sworn statement from the
supervisor in question, though, reads in June twenty twenty four,
(13:11):
Michael Scheuer was terminated from employment due to misconduct against
me in which he threatened me at work, and the
government was prepared to present to witness who would testify
that his behavior had been aggressive and threatening in the
meeting that led to his termination. And maybe that comes
down to semantics. Maybe she perceived his conduct as threatening
(13:34):
without him actually making a direct threat. That is technically
different in the eyes of the law. But I think
any reasonable person can understand that if you make your
supervisor feel like she is in danger, you might get fired.
(14:07):
He was initially just sent home and suspended, but after
he sent an email to human resources described only as
quote twenty four questions pertaining to the suspension, which I'm
sure had a very normal tone, the decision was made
to terminate his employment with Disney. And this is the
(14:28):
point at which he crossed the weird little guy rubicon.
He was upset. It wasn't fair. This was his dream.
He loved Disney, he loved working for Disney, and he
needed that job. He needed the health insurance, he had
a family to take care of. For God's sake, they
just didn't understand. If they would have heard him out,
(14:50):
they would understand that they were wrong to fire him,
but they wouldn't take his calls. He claims that he
was unable to find an employment lawyer willing to take
his case. He says he quote filed a complaint with
the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission but did not get
a quick response. He felt isolated and depressed. He did
(15:13):
not understand why nobody would speak with him. And this
is the explanation his attorney offered for what happened next quote,
he turned to what he thought would get Disney to
respond to him. I'm not an expert in employment law,
but I did look up how long it usually takes
(15:34):
to get a response from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission
if you file a complaint online, The law says they
have ten days to send notice of the complaint to
your former employer, and then once they do that, the
employer has thirty days from that date to respond to it.
The average complaint takes about ten months to resolve start
(15:55):
to finish. But he didn't even wait thirty days before
he decided to change tactics. He started trying to get
Disney's attention his own way less than three weeks after
he was fired, and so you might be thinking, oh,
he probably sent some weird emails to his former coworkers, right,
(16:17):
Maybe he started showing up outside the office or making
a lot of phone calls. And those are all reasonable guesses.
Those are things you might do if your stated goal
was to get someone's attention. No, what he decided to
do is much weirder, and honestly, I don't understand why
(16:40):
he thinks we would believe his claim that this was
the only thing he could think of that would get
them to call him again. From his lawyer quote, he
started altering Disney's menus to try to get their attention
and respond to him. Now, remember that was his job
before he was fired. He worked on the team responsible
(17:03):
for designing, editing, and updating the files used to print
the menus at restaurants and cafes at Disney parks and hotels.
Once the files were approved by the team at Disney,
the physical menus were printed by a Minnesota based print
and marketing company called Tailor Corporation. Just a few weeks
after being fired, Scheyer logged into the online application used
(17:26):
by the print company to manage the menu files. A
lot of the news coverage about this case refers to
what he did as hacking, in which I didn't realize
is technically the correct word for what happened. Hacking doesn't
necessarily require any particular set of skills or you know,
it's not like a nineties movie where they're tippy tapping
(17:47):
on the keyboard as all the numbers flash on the screen. No,
it just means any unauthorized access to a computer device
or network. And he definitely was not authorized to be
logging in. But the company had actually just forgotten to
change the password to the administrative account, and once he
logged into that administrator's account, he created a new employee
(18:11):
profile for himself using a fake name, and then using
that account with a fake name, he logged in and
he went to town. He replaced all of the font
files for all of the menus in the system, and
this sounds like hell. He didn't just change the fonts
(18:32):
that were used in the text of the menus. He
changed the source files for all of the fonts in
every menu, so all of the names of the fonts
still appeared to be correct, but those names were now
connected to a corresponding file for a different font, and
(18:53):
he changed most of those fonts to wing dings the
font that's just weird little symbols. And because he'd altered
the files themselves, the system then started pushing out this
change to every single one of the thousands of files
ever uploaded to this system, and this rendered the entire
(19:14):
application completely useless for at least a week. And so
because this took the entire system offline and rendered every
single file useless, obviously they noticed this immediately. Disney pretty
quickly tracked down the source of the problem and they
changed all the passwords so this couldn't happen again. But
(19:35):
that didn't really stop him. So now that one avenue
had been closed off, he just moved to a different strategy.
If he couldn't log in, he would make sure no
one else could either. He started small targeting those immediate supervisors,
the ones who'd fired him, and he used their log
in names and entered random, incorrect passwords. These repeated bad
(20:01):
attempts to access the system, which would then trigger the
accounts to be locked out. At first, he was just
doing this manually, so you have to imagine him sitting
alone at his computer while his chronically ill wife is
trying to take care of their three young children, one
of whom is a newborn baby, and he's just sitting
there at his computer again and again and again, typing
(20:24):
in a random keyboard smash password and hitting enter over
it over and over again so that his old boss
can't access her email. Throughout August and September of twenty
twenty four, these attacks escalated, and he eventually wrote a
script to automate the process of making these thousands and
thousands of login attempts. On one day alone, he made
(20:49):
eight thousand login attempts across accounts belonging to the four
people that he thought were responsible for firing him, and
he eventually branched out to fourteen day for An accounts,
all of which belonged to members of the team he'd
worked on before he was fired. Over the course of
about a month, he made one hundred thousand log in attempts,
(21:12):
locking these employees out of their accounts for days at
a time. And around the same time he's ramping up
these attacks on his former coworkers accounts, he found a
new way to mess with the menus Disney had changed
all of the passwords, so he couldn't access the application
that was used by the Disney production team anymore. But
(21:32):
the company that actually prints the finished menu files had
their own system. All finished menu files had to be
uploaded to the print company through a secure file transfer protocol.
So he made his own menu files and uploaded them
directly to the printer. His initial attempt to get Disney's
(21:55):
attention had made the menus unusable. They had nonsense fonts,
they would load the image files, or they just came
up as blank pages, so everyone noticed this. This was
a very obvious attempt, But this time around he was
a lot more subtle. If you're just looking quickly at
these files, you wouldn't notice there was anything wrong. Honestly,
(22:18):
they might have even made it all the way through
a proofreading process if you weren't being really meticulous. Because
he's just changing individual words. He's changing the prices by
a dollar or two. He removed an asterisk, he changed
the QR codes. They're just little changes, almost like maybe
he didn't want them to notice this time, And honestly,
(22:43):
some of them are kind of funny. I mean, overall, yes,
this is a bad situation. He should not have done
any of this, But if he'd just stuck with immature
little jokes, the whole story would have a really different tone,
because it's hard to be mad about stuff like changing
cheesy grits to cheesy shits on the menu for a
(23:06):
cafe at Disney's old Key West resort, or changing shellfish
to hellfish, or changing the description of an English breakfast
tea from a psalm tea to just ass tea. Is
a little bit funny. I'm not mad imagining an old
couple in Key West seeing cheesy shits on their menu.
(23:26):
It's whatever. But unfortunately, most of the changes were not
funny swear words. Most of the changes were modifications to
the allergen information on menu items across multiple dining locations,
removing alerts on menu items that contained potentially fatal food
allergens like peanuts. On other menus, he altered the region
(23:49):
listed for wine selections. That one sounds mostly harmless to me.
Not a wine snob, so I don't really care where
the grapes were grown. I'm not going to pretend I
can taste the difference. But he swapped out the actual
locations for places where well known mass shootings have occurred.
In one case, the shooting had been painfully recent. He
(24:13):
swapped out Willamette Valley. On one wine for Appalachi High
an unmistakable reference to a school shooting in Georgia that
it only just happened the week that he did that.
On another menu, he uploaded a small image of a swastika.
(24:45):
He would later claim that he never actually intended for
any of these altered files to get printed. He said
that he knew Disney employees reviewed every file and that
they would catch the alterations before they went to the printer.
He wasn't actually trying to poison any children with peanut allergies.
He just wanted Disney to call him. He didn't want
(25:08):
these menus to end up in anyone's hands. He just
wanted attention. But that claim falls apart. By the time
he switched to a new mode of attack, he uploaded
altered files directly into the server that functioned as the
print queue for the company that printed the menus. So
by that point in the process, the printer is receiving
(25:30):
what they believe to be a file that has been
proofed and approved and is ready to print. And they did,
in fact print thousands of these altered menus and signs.
Although by the time they did print these the investigation
was coming to an end, and the affected items were
destroyed before they were shipped out, and he wasn't hard
(25:52):
to catch. Immediately after the initial unauthorized access was detected,
Disney launched an internal investigation. Multiple employees interviewed during this
process brought up the fact that Michael Scheuer had just
been fired. Further investigation showed the attacks had all been
made by someone using a VPN to mask their IP address,
(26:17):
but when they looked further back into company logs, they
found that before he was fired, Michael Scheuer had accessed
his work email from home, and when he did that,
he had his VPN on, so he managed to mask
the true IP address of his home computer, but because
he used the same VPN throughout, he was still using
(26:38):
an IP address that was provably connected to him. On
September twenty third, twenty twenty four, multiple members of the
menu production team were locked out of their accounts again.
Someone was making hundreds and hundreds of attempts to access
their accounts using incorrect passwords. At twelve forty one pm
(27:01):
that afternoon, FBI agents knocked on Michael Schuer's front door.
They had a warrant to search his home and seize
his computers. At twelve forty six pm, the wave of
login attempts suddenly stopped and it never started again. Two
minutes after that, Michael Schuyer answered his front door. He
(27:27):
claimed he was surprised to see the FBI there, but
he made a strange comment that he wouldn't have been
surprised if it was the local sheriff there to tell
him to stop sending emails that might be interpreted as threatening.
I have no idea what that means. That never comes
up again. He told the FBI agents that sure, he
(27:49):
definitely used his home computer to access systems related to
his job when he still worked there, and maybe he
logged into some work related stuff after he was fired,
just to get his old pays st ubs, things like that,
but he couldn't think of any reason why they'd be
there asking him questions like that, And when they explained
to him why they were there and what they were investigating,
(28:13):
the outright denied having done anything of the sort. And
then he speculated that maybe Disney was framing him because
they were worried about him. The FBI took his computers
with him that day, but they didn't make an arrest.
A few days later, Michael Scheuer hired an attorney and
(28:34):
checked himself into an impatient mental health facility. Meanwhile, the
FBI was still building their case against him, including getting
a search warrant for his Google account. Then, on October
twenty second, twenty twenty four, a month after they searched
his house, Michael Schuer received an automated notice from Google
(28:54):
that they'd been served with a warrant for his account
and they would be complying with the order to turn
over him account information. Now, I imagine that's a really
scary email to get. I'm not sure what my initial
reaction would be in that situation. The right answer if
this happens to you is to call a lawyer. The
(29:15):
extremely wrong answer is to then type please explain this
to me at the top of the email, and then
forward that email to the FBI agent who was just
at your house, and then follow that up with another
email the next day demanding that the agent loop in
the victim of the crime on the conversation so you
(29:36):
can get some answers about what's going on here. Perhaps
an even worse course of action in this situation would
be to then drive to your former boss's house in
the middle of the night and stand on his front
porch making a thumbs up at his security camera, and
then just walking away. It's hard to say what you
would do in a stressful situation that you have never
(29:58):
experienced before. I don't want a Monday morning quarterback here.
I like to think that I would just call a lawyer.
I don't think that I would do all that other stuff.
But that is what Michael Scheyer did. The day after
he paid that ominous visit to his former supervisor, the
FBI rode up and filed the criminal complaint. Whatever timeline
(30:22):
they'd had in mind was irrelevant. Now this guy was
behaving unpredictably and they needed to go ahead and make
the arrest, probably in large part because he made that
strange nighttime visit to his former boss's house and then
the subsequent restraining orders granted to two of his former supervisors.
He was held without bond. After two months in jail,
(30:45):
he entered a plea agreement. He pled guilty to computer
hacking and identity theft, and was sentenced to thirty six
months in prison during the three year period of supervised release.
After he gets out. He's not allowed to have any
contact with any of his victims. So that's those fourteen
co workers and the Disney Corporation in the grand scheme
(31:09):
of weird little guys. This is all pretty minor. Nobody
really got hurt. It cost about one hundred and fifty
thousand dollars to reprint the affected materials, and Disney estimates
that the ordeal cost them about six hundred thousand dollars
in total. I have to admit I don't particularly care
if the Walt Disney Corporation lost half a million dollars.
(31:32):
If the alterations hadn't been caught and those menus had
been sent out to the restaurants, someone could have gotten
seriously hurt. But they didn't, and according to Michael Schouer,
he knew they wouldn't. I don't know that that's true.
It's impossible to say at this point. But again, in
(31:52):
the end, nothing really happened, did it. I initially came
across this case during my regular search for newly filed
cases containing certain keywords I like to look for. I
think in this case it was the word swastika. But
I don't actually really think that this guy's a Nazi.
(32:15):
I don't have any other evidence that points to that
swastika being a larger part of his life. When the
FBI came and took his computer away, there was a
file on his desktop called swastika dot png. He must
have googled the word swastika and then saved the image
that he wanted to use on the menu. It kind
(32:36):
of reminds me of early four chan culture. I don't
mean the four Chan of today. I mean way back
in the day before those guys were genuinely sincere neo
Nazis and mass murder enthusiasts. A lot of them were
just shit talking. They wanted to be extreme, they wanted
to be edgy. They wanted to post the most shocking,
fucked up stuff they could think of because that was
(32:58):
funny or thrilling or interesting. I guess so, I'm inclined
to believe he put the swastika on the menu because
it was the worst thing he could think of, not
because he actually liked it. I mean, I hope that's
the case. I'm a little less generous when it comes
(33:19):
to the mass shooting thing, though. That's odd to me.
That feels like a manifestation of some nascent interest. I
don't know that that's something that would come immediately to
mind if you're just trolling and you have no existing
preoccupation with mass shootings. You know. But that's just my gut.
There's no evidence of anything at all about his motivations.
(33:44):
This is the only thing he ever did. He crashed
out at work, and it sent him into a tailspin
that ended in federal prison. The only glimpse into Michael
Schuer's motivation that I can offer you is this Reddit
post he made just a few days before the FBI
showed up at his house for the first time. On
a subreddit for people with social anxiety. He made a
(34:05):
post with the title reaching the end question mark. It's long,
but it reads in part, the people involved in firing
me treated me like a criminal, me who is afraid
of everyone and just wants to blend into the background.
I was blown away how absolutely nobody cared about me.
(34:27):
Not one person from work reached out to check on me.
I'm sure part of the reason is because I'm a
man and everyone just assumed I don't need anyone. Maybe
the other part is because I'm an awkward asshole. I
have no friends, no work connections, nothing I've already determined
I will never work again. Nobody cares about me. He
(34:50):
goes on to say that he started therapy earlier that year,
but when he got fired, he realized it was too late,
too late for what is unclear, too late to change,
too late to make anything of his life. It has
a vaguely suicidal tone, but he doesn't actually express a
desire to harm himself. On the contrary, he seems fixated
(35:14):
on harming others, writing quote, every day since I was fired,
I sit around fuming, planning revenge because I feel so wronged.
But then I remember, maybe they aren't the problem. Maybe
it's me. I've always been afraid of everybody, but it's
everybody that's been afraid of me. And there it is,
(35:37):
isn't it. He said it himself because I feel so wronged.
It's remarkably self aware. It reminds me a lot of
what Frank Sweeney said when the cops finally searched his
house and discovered he'd been the one sending those threatening
postcards all those years. He just didmitted it. He said
(36:02):
that woman in the parking lot had made him feel embarrassed,
and it made him feel better to know that he
was causing her distress and return. Being a weird little
guy is something that exists on a spectrum. I think
some of them are truly monsters. They kill, name, torture,
(36:23):
and terrorize. They carry out mass shootings and blow up
synagogues and daycares. They're trying to start a race war,
they want to barricade themselves on a compound and shoot
it out with the police, or they just want to
gain enough political power to punish their enemies. Those are
the guys I was thinking about when I started the show.
But there are weird little guys out there who are
(36:45):
much much littler, guys whose behavior fits the archetype but
only registers a little blit on the radar. And those
are the kinds of guys you're most likely to meet
one day, God willing, most of us will never meet
a mass shooter, but you probably will eventually encounter the
(37:06):
kind of guy who just can't take no for an answer,
so he puts a swastika on the menu at the
Mickey Mouse Cafe. Weird Little Guys is a production of
(37:30):
cools On Media and iHeartRadio. It's research, written and recorded
by me Molly Conger Our Executive producers are Sophie Linterman
and Mabert Evans. The show is edited by the wildly
talented Mary Gagan. The theme music was composed by Brad Dickert.
You can email me a Weird Little Guys podcast at
gmail dot com. I will definitely read it, but I
probably won't answer it. It's nothing personal. You can exchange
(37:50):
conspiracy theories about the show with other listeners on the
Weird Little Guy subreddit. Just don't boast anything that's going
to make you one of my weird Little Guys.
Host
Molly Conger
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