"DO AS I SAY,
NOT AS I DO"
"Al, you've been on the internet a lot," he said, this time plunking down a thick stack of papers on his desk blotter. "You know what this is?"
A print-out of the sites I've visited, I thought.
"It's a print-out of the sites you've visited," he said, quoting my thoughts word-for-word. This was the first of several times that he displayed an uncanny knack for telepathy. It would get even more acute in a few seconds. "This stack here is from one eight-hour period."
I eyed the inch-high pile in front of him and thought, Bullshit, then stuck a mental Post-it on my frontal lobe for later.
"The numbers don't lie, Al."
That was his favorite phrase. "Numbers don't lie." He had it stitched on a tiny pillow on his couch at home, I was sure of it. If I had a dollar for every time I heard him use it during the eight months since he had been kicked forcibly down to my department from the powers that be, I wouldn't have minded being fired without warning. I could have driven home that fateful night in my new Lamborghini and just retired 30 years early.
But the funny part is, numbers DO lie. You can't trust numbers. They're falsified all the time. What if Elliot Ness saw Al Capone's financial records and took them as the gospel truth? Numbers are as suspect as the phrase, "I did not have sexual relations with Ms. Lewinsky."
"Why were you online for an entire shift?" he demanded, squirting a wad of brown juice into his mug. A long strand was formed when he pulled the mug away too soon, and he clumsily tried to save face by swiping his chin with his bare palm, then pawed it off on his K-mart slacks. Classy.
I explained that since the network took so long to process an enrollment whenever one was entered, I kept Explorer open so I could read something while I waited. The truth.
Acme's hard drives were four years old and they attempted to perform more illegal operations than an American med student with a diploma from Guatemala. The main problem was they utilized Microsoft Access when an Oracle system was needed. The place was a model of impracticality and inefficiency.
John got the go-ahead from upstairs to hire several expensive DBAs as consultants, and after weeks of work, I recall seeing a new button show up one day on the main menu of the database. I clicked it once to see what would happen, and the names of the DBAs and their high scores on Tetris popped up.
John was fond of saying that he was changing everything for the better so more work could be done faster, but till that point all he'd really done was blow hot air and hire a lot of temps. This only slowed the overburdened network down more--the equivalent of trying to keep a wading pool from overflowing by dumping fat, spastic children in by the truckload.
He also subscribed to an industry trade magazine, which he promptly handed out to his pet CSRs on first shift so they could look for ideas to pass on to him. I believe that was the origin of the colorful bulletin board and the failed "Happy Notes" project, in which you kept an envelope at your cubicle and others were supposed to put encouraging messages in it to boost your morale. ("You are a hard worker and you occassionally clean out the coffee pots.")
I should be fair, for a moment, and point out that he showed a genuine interest in learning about and improving the daily work in our department. He even flew all the way to Florida to attend an expensive two-day seminar. That he stayed at a resort in Disney World probably didn't factor into his decision at all, I'm sure.
"I thought that would be your answer," he replied, not buying my explanation for even a moment. He then promptly denied me the use of the internet on company computers. I had to sign a paper saying I understood our discussion.
And that's when things got really creepy. Because all the time while I was being reamed, all I could think about were two things: 1) I wished a Russian satellite on a decaying orbit would crash through the roof over his desk and distintegrate him on impact--and I could visualize it vividly, the same way most people can picture Steve the Crocodile Hunter being seized by the arm by a large, pissed reptile on Animal Planet during a very special episode, and 2) I remembered a story I had heard about John T. shortly after I started work at Acme three and a half years earlier.
"John's computer crashed, and when Dan went upstairs to find out why, he found it full of tons of temp files from porno sites."
So while I was replaying this memory in my head, he leveled his gaze at me, probed my thoughts, and said, "There was a rumor going around a few years back about me."
Oh no, he's not gonna...
"They called me 'The Porno King.' Did you know that?"
I shook my head, distressed that my mind was apparently easier to read than "Hop On Pop," but I was immediately delighted to have a nickname for him I hadn't been aware of before then.
He proceeded to tell me the whole sordid tale, except he denied the part about how he was responsible. Yes, his computer crashed. Yes, the temporary internet folder was loaded with files from porn sites. But, no, it wasn't him who did it. It seems an intern had been logging on at his desk and secretly visiting those sites.
The best part was, I knew he was lying through his teeth. And I knew this because the story had been confirmed by the aforementioned Dan, the company's computer guru at the time. Now who should I believe? A guy who, from the moment he met me, called me by a nickname I hadn't heard since grammar school*, or a no-nonsense computer savant who maintained 50 terminals and several servers for a multi-million-dollar corporation?
You're wrong, John, I thought. It's not numbers that don't lie. Cookie folders don't lie. And when yours is full of files reading johnt@sexhound.com, who are you to tell me not to surf the web for recreation at work?
Can you imagine being so humiliated by an incident three years past that you feel compelled to dig it out, brush it off, and present it for discussion in an attempt to rewrite history? You might as well just cop to it. Besides, what kind of a man WON'T cop to even "accidentally" stumbling across online porn in a private discussion with another man? Own up. The Guy Code's in effect. I'll reciprocate. I'll tell you about the first Playboy I ever saw. It's the same difference. Just don't feed me the line, "I know what a naked woman looks like, I don't HAVE to look at that stuff." (Yes, he actually said that.)
If he'd been been able to tell what I was thinking before, he could surely tell that I didn't believe this lame explanation now. And I think this was the first time he saw something in my eyes he didn't like. It was one part thinly-disguised defiance and one part...something else. And once he put his finger on it, it would be the beginning of the end for me.
As our meeting wound down that night, I decided to go fishing to see if I could add "liar" below "hypocrite" on his profile.
"So that whole print-out is from HOW many nights?" I asked.
"That's about a week's worth," he answered.
Bingo.
* If your last name was Walker, for example, he'd call you Runner. He had a razor-sharp wit.