By Shawn Rohrbach

It wasn’t like Jim was such a bad guy.  Sometimes he was really likeable even though he went out of his way to make people feel uncomfortable a lot.  The worst thing about him is that he lied to get his job and so many people would have been so much better at it.

            I wouldn’t ask my mother to row a boat across Puget Sound, she would die trying.  Now, becoming a Vice President of Information Technology isn’t anything like rowing a boat across a large body of water.  It’s more like sitting around an office and convincing people to do things they really don’t want to do.  But you need to know something about technology.

            Jim died a young man because he lied to get his job and the job killed him.  I warned him in July of how bad he looked and that he ought to get to the gym a bit more and quit smoking.  I got the usual from him; smoking was his right and he served twenty years in the army to make sure he had his rights, so he wasn’t going to quit smoking.  They all said it was smoking that killed him but I say it was the lying and then the cover up.

            Lying does that.  You write a nasty letter anonymously to your boss, it causes a big stink and people get fired over it and then they ask you if you wrote it and you say “hell no”, but it’s a damn lie and every time you see that letter on the bosses desk your stomach turns and you wonder if they have checked it for prints, traced the purchase of the envelope and even taken DNA of the saliva that you used to lick the stamp and they are just waiting for a Friday afternoon to fire your ass.  You think about it all the time and try to justify in your head the letter really benefited the customers who were getting screwed because the network never worked right because Jim lied to get his job.  That’s what lying does.  It totally messes you up.  More on that later.

            Jim didn’t drink.   He should have, maybe.  He would see his personnel file out on the bosses desk and he would freak; maybe they were checking his back ground again and the iron clad references he once had would tell the truth finally and he would get canned.  Jim was on his way up and once told me of the lie.  He regretted that, a lot.

            Always after telling me he lied, he would bring in a magazine article or a new techno gadget and tell me how much he loved technology and I knew it was just compounding the lie.  I listened but I just knew he hated technology and it was just one of those rocks in the middle of the river you stepped on to get across.  He wanted to be senior management.

            This all came to a head when I went out fishing with him.  He had just been promoted to Senior Network Administrator. He made good money on the new job and bought a Boston Whaler and new gear.  I promised to bring the beer and did so in my Coleman cooler.  Jim was really from a simple background like me and thought the cooler was really nice.  It was for the average guy, but for someone making the kind of money Jim was, he could have afforded much better.  But he really liked my cooler.   I also bought average beer and Jim drank it down just fine.  He never made the transition; he really wasn’t upper management material.  Upper management always chartered a boat and the food and booze was catered.  They never carried a heavy cooler from the truck out to the docks; the Mexicans did that and they just sat around smoking cigars and let the guides catch the fish.  Jim wouldn’t have liked that. 

            That’s what was so strange about Jim.  He was such an average guy who lied his way into a position where he really knew nothing about the job and then he stuck out so obviously around other upper management types.  I asked him about that while we sat in the Boston Whaler casting for trout.

            I probably should not have brought it up.  He was pretty quiet at first, but he got a little agitated after that. I apologized and said we should just drop the subject.  He did for a while, then he slammed his pole on the bottom of the boat.

            “Change the subject, huh?”  He was pretty red in the face.  “You brought it up goddam it, and now you want to change the fucking subject.”  He tore his shirt off and stood in the boat, fists all clenched like he wanted to fight.  I don’t like fighting.  When I fight I get into this rage and absolutely refuse to lose and I end up really hurting people and Jim was one of the few friends I had and fighting really messes up friendships, so I just let things cool down and I played puppy dog and didn’t drop my pole.  Jim cooled down and called me some dirty names and went back fishing.

            A few beers later we were laughing again and things seemed to be going smoothly.  I really wanted to get to shore and stand on firm ground before Jim got mad at me again, so I just laughed along and kept on fishing.  Jim kept rubbing his chest over his heart and coughed a few times.  He lit up several times before we got to shore flicking each cigarette into the water when he was done.

            Jim asked me to dinner and I said I had to get home.  That was a lie, but I told so few he really believed me and I went to my favorite bar instead.  Jim said he was going home to download some trail versions of Enterprise applications he was considering for the company, and I knew he was still full of bullshit but didn’t say anything.

            Things got really out of hand a few days later in a meeting where one of the guys from the server room was listening to Jim’s bullshit and started to laugh.  He was a nice kid and usually kept his mouth shut around management, but this time Jim was so far off the mark even I knew it.  The president of the company asked Jim if the application he was planning to buy would allow them all to communicate from home in virtual meetings and Jim nodded his head and said “Yep, that’s why I recommend it.”  That’s when the kid started to laugh.

            Jim got so red in the face I thought he was going to burst some veins.  The president asked the kid why he was laughing, and sensing the seriousness of the situation the kid apologized.  “Sorry, sir, but I went through this with Jim yesterday.  He asked me to assess this software for virtual meetings and I told him there was a better product, but he kept insisting this was the one he wanted, but it won’t do what he was asking unless we modify it ourselves.”

            That’s when Jim told the big lie.  “That’s not what you told me, Jason.  You told me it was an easy fix.  I depend on you guys for this information and when you sand bag me like that, what the hell am I do to?  Look, I want to talk to senior management alone.  You guys go back to that room of yours and I will deal with you later.”  The president raised his eyebrows and then smiled.  He liked managers who did this.  He looked at the technicians like “Go see your mommies” or something like that.  They left and Jim just apologized all over the floor until I thought he was going to start sucking the president’s toes.

            I knew something would happen soon.  Once you knife your own crew in the back, it’s over.  Jim didn’t spend much time in the server room after that and morale got pretty low.  Knowing my paycheck was generated somewhere on those servers, I got to know the guys over lunch a bit and let them ventilate about Jim.  I advised them they should help him go higher up where he wouldn’t care about them anymore and they thought that was a good idea.  I was sure I got them motivated to help Jim and not to piss him off by shutting down the servers or something.

            They sent in the youngest guy who apologized to the president for misleading Jim.  They all thought the old man would thank the kid for his honestly but instead he fired him on the spot; actually had security follow him to his desk and clean out his personal effects.  They all sat stunned in the server room.  I’m glad I never told them to do that because they still confided in me and I was happy the servers were safe for a while longer.

            Jim confronted one of the IT guys with an email.   His emails would go on and on like he was this big, angry old man and he would make veiled threats about getting people kicked out on the street. Other than trying to get in a fight with me, he really was a chicken shit.  That’s the best word to describe him. More like chicken shit to your face, but behind your back he wanted you to think he was out to get you.  The confrontation was about one of the networking guys who just got his Masters degree in Information Systems or something and was talking about applying for the Vice President job that Jim wanted. The email went like this: “I’m not moving up or out.  I love IT and this is where I’m staying.  In fact, they are thinking of creating a position as Vice President of IT and I am in line to get it, and if you try to fuck this up I am going to personally see you to the rear exit of the building.”  He forwarded me a copy of it and he wrote in mine: “This goes for you too.”  An hour later I saw him in the lunch room and he laughed at me with those bad fitting dentures and asked how my wife was.

            This when you start looking for a new job.  You think; shit this guy is not going to leave.  The guy is an incompetent moron and no one gets it; nothing happens.  It just keeps on going the same fucked up way and everyone bitches and moans about it but nothing happens.  You begin to wonder if all those management types have their heads up their asses or are they afraid to fire someone.   

            That’s when I wrote the letter I mentioned earlier.  I wrote it from the point of view of one of the younger IT guys and it was addressed to the representative from the Department of Defense who oversaw our certification to ensure network security to government standards.  Without that certification we were out of business like it was the most important piece of paper in the business.  I put in the letter something about Jim making contact with a guy from a rival company at a bowling alley and they talked all night about the contract we just got for the computer software on the submarines.  I mentioned something about a new wife, how long I had worked for the company and a few other things that would quietly identify the author as one of the young server room guys. I went on about how I feared for retribution and stuff like that, but it was pretty obvious I was trying to make it look like one of those guys wrote the letter anonymously.

            It took a few weeks but the shit hit the fan hard and the young guy was fired. He had no clue what the hell was going on and Jim got his promotion to Vice President of IT.  That’s when the guys started to really bitch. I told them over coffee everyone has two options, stick it out or find another job. 

            I was called into the president’s office and asked if I knew anything about a letter being written and I said no.  I asked if I should know the contents of the letter and I was just waved away.  I could see the letter in front of him on the desk with the little coffee stain in the bottom left hand corner.  I wrote that letter.  The president looked up at me and said, “This is very serious; this may cost us big time. Keep your ears open about this.”

 I felt like my chest was going to explode and sent out two resumes immediately.  I got a call the next day for an interview.  I came in late the day after the interview and the guys in the server room had walked out and the rep from the Department of Defense was asking to see the access logs for the past three months and no one was there to help him but Jim and of course he knew absolutely nothing about logs.  He was sitting at the server entering passwords from the password book left and right and freezing the servers because he was trying too many times and the guy from Defense was getting really pissed off.  I motioned to Jim to let me have a look and he stood up to go have a smoke.

            Sometimes I think God just plants the right thing in my brain at the right time and not knowing anything about servers I found the logs and showed the guy.  By now the president of the company was in the server room and the Defense guy had settled down and thought I really knew my IT shit.  He said a bunch of stuff to me and I nodded and cracked a wry smile and he laughed.  He thanked me and said that’s all he needed and could he ask for me when he came back and I said sure, this right in front of the president. 

            They found Jim half an hour later in the alley with a cigarette in his hand laying flat on his face, stone dead.  They hauled him away and the IT guys called in to see how things were going and when I told them all about the Department of Defense, the Logs, and then about Jim.  They hurried back and went to the server room.  We talked about it all afternoon behind the locked door of the server room while senior management huddled in the conference room without lunch. 

            They always ordered lunch when they went into the conference room and we got what was left over but this was serious.  A guy gets a promotion and in the same week he dies right when the Department of Defense is thinking they are all a bunch of lying screw ups, which they were, but they needed a strategy, a game plan to get out of this shit mess.

            They came out of the conference room and asked the guys from the server room to join them and they sat in there behind closed doors for an hour.  I sat in my cubicle watching some hands get wild and voices were raised.  Things got real quiet for a while and the door opened at about three and I got called in.

The letter was sitting in front of one of the young server room guys.  If anyone had been trained as a cop they would have seen me turn white and my stomach give way, but I tried hard not to notice it but my eyes were just fixed on the letter.  They had been talking about the letter, the guy who supposedly wrote it and probably Jim.  The president asked for the letter back as I sat down and placed it inside his black folder.  There was a lot of silence for a long time and no water on the table to drink and my throat was very dry. The president sat at the end of the table squeezing a small rubber ball.  He cleared his throat and asked how I was holding up, considering Jim and I were close.  I wanted to say we were not that close, but I just said “Fine” instead.  He went on about how there had been some confusion about a letter, that it cost the company a lot and really hurt some people.  He got really quiet then stood up.  He put his hands on his hips and asked me if I wanted to be interim Vice President of IT and I said “Sure.”

End.