Happy New Year, Siegfried. And a pleasant retirement.

At the end of 2025, I met up with a former colleague. But I wish I hadn't. Siegfried, as I'll call him here, and I worked for over ten years at a communications agency in Berlin. We usually had different clients, but the same short-statured boss with a severe narcissistic personality disorder. He bullied Siegfried at first, and later me.

Siegfried had emailed me back in October 2025. He'd found me through my blog www.man-mit-parkinson.de and suggested we meet up. After more than ten years. I was pleased. I thought we'd have something to talk about after so long. And I really thought he'd have learned something and grown as a person.

I should have known better. Our meeting lasted about an hour. A long 60 minutes. But it was over halfway through. Siegfried talked a lot, but said nothing. And asked even fewer questions. I can barely remember one and a half questions Siegfried asked me:

I told him about another colleague in Hamburg who, around 2021, had also been diagnosed with Parkinson's disease, just as I had been in 2013. That alone would normally have been enough for a follow-up question. Or at least a brief expression of sympathy. But Siegfried isn't normal. He simply asked, in a few words, whether the colleague in question had reduced her working hours.

The other question Siegfried asked me wasn't really a question at all. It was more of a rhetorical setup, a perfect setup that Siegfried had set for himself: I had written at the beginning of my blog that hiking in the Himalayas at over 5,000 meters gave me so much energy. For him, with his fear of heights, that was out of the question.

Siegfried didn't want to ask any questions at all. He didn't want any answers either. All he wanted was confirmation that he'd fared well over the past ten years, better than me with my Parkinson's diagnosis. He'd played those kinds of games back then, the poor wretch. He hasn't learned a thing in the intervening years.

The morning after our reunion, I briefly considered emailing Siegfried to ask if he'd noticed anything unusual during or after our meeting. But I decided against it. It wouldn't have made any difference.

There are too many Siegfrieds around these days.

Christmas tree in front of the Brandenburg Gate at Pariser Platz - December 2023.