In 1996, I worked at a company near Philadelphia, PA named ISA.  ISA was a smallish company consisting of 200-300 employees that provided outsourcing services for tool and parts distribution to factories.  If you had a factory, and you were sick of keeping tooling and parts inventory around, and hiring people to manage that inventory, you hired us.  We set up a little nook in your factory and handed out tools and parts to factory line workers, doing bookkeeping and restocking as necessary, and you didn't have to do that anymore.

Prior to working at ISA I had run a business named Connect.  Connect was a company which combined computer hardware sales, LAN support, network cabling, and custom cablemaking.  For example, we'd wire you up a V.35 cable or provide a custom cable to connect some godforsaken Tektronix printer to a Sun workstation.  Or we might sell you a computer, or some extra memory, or a hard drive.  Or we might wire your office for Token Ring (that joke's still on you).  I was Connect's president and owner, and, unfortunately, also its chief debtor.  Connect, in early 1996, was sinking fast after three years of my own inexperience and mismanagement.  I was 24 years old.

Mike, the subject of this screed, had been a Connect customer.  Sort of.  In 1995, Mike had asked us to respond to an RFP to upgrade the RAM and hard drives on more than 100 computers at the local hospital at which he held the position of "chief guy in charge of upgrading computers", I guess.  I spent more than 100 hours coming up with a detailed RFP response using an inventory list and a set of target configurations provided by Mike to compute a detailed upgrade parts list and cost.  Mike apparently threw this response into the trash after cribbing information from it, eventually providing that information to someone who I presume he liked more.  Such was life at the time.  Mike called me again in late 1995 asking for a price for a computer toolkit that needed to be shipped in a great rush.  Annoyed by our earlier interactions, I asked him the outrageous price of $190.00 for a toolkit which cost me $8.00 plus $21.00 in UPS Red shipping.  I figured he'd just say no.  He didn't, agreeing breezily, and I made a usurous profit on the deal.  It seemed pretty dumb for him to spend so much money for the part, even if I did get it to him quickly, but I didn't feel badly about this at all.  It was minor payback for the RFP fiasco as far as I was concerned.

In early 1996, Mike got in touch with me again.  He had quit the hospital and had begun to work in middle management at ISA.  To my surprise, he offered me an interview for a job at ISA entitled "WAN Manager".  I wasn't in much of a position to refuse.  The job topic seemed fun.  The salary was good, and it was relatively local.  I needed to start earning money badly, and I was eager to get out of self-employment.  My previous experience with Mike had not been entirely positive, but it was also more or less just business.  I figured Mike was an opportunist, and, as I was obviously not immune to being one of those myself, I wasn't going to fault him for it.  So I interviewed, got the job, and came to work at ISA.  Mike would be my direct boss.  I didn't really know him at all, I had spent a grand total of maybe three hours talking to him over the course of several years.

The year 1996 was, of course, pre-ubiquitous-broadband-internet-connectivity, so many point-to-point network links were used to make ISA go.  The "WAN Manager" job description was to make sure that a set of frame relay circuits that were wired up from our central location in Pennsylvania to each remote customer site kept working, and that the hardware which ran our accounting and inventory systems -- both in-house and remote -- didn't fall over.  I would debug circuit and server issues as necessary.  We had a network composed of 3Com and Cisco gear, over which was transferred Novell IPX and, only very occasionally, TCP/IP.  I wasn't doing any programming at ISA, so I don't know the gory details of the software stack, but, in general, the developers used a system named Magic (yes, really) as a client-server deployment platform.  The clients were Windows systems, and most of the servers were Novell NetWare systems.  The company had plans to move to Windows NT on servers, as was fashionable at the time.  Windows NT 4 had just come out, and it was the new hotness on the server side for small and medium businesses.  There was also management pressure to move from Magic to PowerBuilder as a development platform.  But that transition had not been completed either.

Regardless of technology specifics, the company itself delivered a lot of value to its customers.  They were extremely happy to get rid of stocking and inventory duties.  ISA had very few truly unhappy customers, if any.  It was quite a good business.  This was, in part, due to the superhuman efforts of many on the ISA technical staff, which included many excellent programmers and systems adminstrators.  Its onsite employees were, in my experience, also top-notch.  But, unfortunately, by any measure, you could not put Mike on the plus side of an equation which delivered any sort of value to anyone.  Mike turned out to be the worst boss I've ever had.  He possessed a uniquely toxic combination of traits which would make my stay at ISA unpleasant and short.  In fact, the only truly good thing I got out of my employment at ISA, aside from some good friends, was this story.

Mike was about 26 or so, red-haired, with a mustache, slightly paunchy, married, with a couple of kids.  Mike, it turned out, had not just a run-of-the-mill chip on his shoulder, but a boulder.  His boulder was the kind that comes from getting beat up a lot in school, or maybe from being similarly abused at home.  He was desperately controlling and overbearing, paranoid, tactless, and socially inept.  This combination of traits made him mindbendingly difficult to deal with and, yet, somehow, at the same time, absolutely pitiful, and often comical.  It was often hard not to feel badly for him, as he didn't do a great job at hiding his obviously real emotional problems.  At the same time, he treated everyone around him so poorly that it was hard for anyone but the most charitable to have any good things to say about him.

Despite being tasked to manage three highly technical employees, Mike knew very little about technology.  How he managed to be hired for any technical job is a minor mystery.  We've all had many technology-challenged bosses: being technically lackluster is not a trait exceptional to a middle manager.  However, as far as technological ignorance went, Mike was simply in a league of his own.  We, his subordinates, were effectively on our own if we wanted to get any sort of technical thing done for the business.  Mike could not himself provide services or help customers.  He could, however, exercise control.  A typical work conversation with Mike usually went something like this:

"Mike, we got some new servers in today.  The folks in Tulsa have needed one for a couple of months now, should I get one ready and ship it out?"

"No.  We'll keep all the servers until someone asks."

"They already asked, Mike.  We've actually gotten two shipments of servers in.  The first shipment is still sitting in the corner, this is the second one. You said when we got the first shipment that we'd ship them a server when we got the second shipment in.  The second shipment is in.  We'll have plenty of servers left over after shipping one to Tulsa, like 10 of them."

"What did I just say?  We'll keep the servers til someone asks."

To Mike, a server was just a square box, a unit of trade, not a business tool or necessity of any kind.  To him, servers, routers, modems, and other computing devices were just objects to be bought and sold, items that had no worth apart from their physical manifestations.  He didn't truly understand that it was what was *on* the server that mattered, not the server itself; that it was what the router *enabled* that mattered, not the router itself.

If Mike had just known nothing and done nothing, his presence would have been simply nominal.  But Mike actually *did* do something.  He actively and effectively withheld parts and services from internal customers whom he believed were not honoring him sufficiently.  Mike ran his department like a tiny Soviet bureaucracy.  Minor nepotism happens at every job, but Mike's was on a scale that bordered on the criminal.  Very little happened in his department without someone paying him a political tithe.  Mike didn't see essential computer parts in his department's inventory; he only saw each as an item for potential personal gain.  He did not consider doing a good job as an activity worth pursuit for its own sake; instead, doing a job was only a payoff for someone stroking his ego or helping his career sufficiently.

Ours was the department that wagged the corporate dog.  The on-location ISA employees, the ISA sales staff, and the ISA programming staff were the true revenue generators in the business.  Our tiny IT department was, in any reality, just overhead, a support function for the real businesspeople.  In business, it's self-evident that you should provide your money-generating people with all the tools they need to continue to produce revenue.  But instead of providing services to the money-producing folks in the business, Mike would attempt to control other departments and people by withholding information, parts, and services until he felt he had been granted an appropriate amount of fealty.  If fealty was not granted, Mike would simply not do his job.  Instead, he would flat-out lie to cover up for his non-provision of parts and services.  "Oh, right you still need a server.  Well we haven't gotten them in yet.  They've been out of stock for a few weeks now."  We only eventually sent parts to Mike's political enemies when a higher-up at ISA got involved due to complaint.  This was rather often, as I remember it.  I really don't know how he wasn't fired.  Maybe he was somebody's cousin.  Or maybe he had some sort of evidence on his own boss that made it awkward to fire him.  I'll never know, I guess.  I have no evidence that Mike ever used his position to do anything actually truly criminal, but if I learned he had, it wouldn't have suprised me at all.

One of the things for which Mike did not withhold service was network outages.  I guess there was no political upside to having a network link down.  Mike, characteristically needing always to feel in control, became strident whenever a network link went down:

"Is the network link to Great Falls down?"

"Hmm.  It looks up, Mike."

"No, it's not up.  I know it's not up!"

"It looks ok here, what's the problem?"

"They're reporting that it's down via email."

"OK, well, I don't see any problem.. do you want me to call them to sort it out?"

"No!  I just want you to get the network link back up."

"But... <sigh> OK, Mike, I'll get the network link back up."

And I would then, of course, be forced to sneak into another office where I would call Great Falls to walk them through the solution to some Windows misconfiguration having nothing to do with a network link.  I would later invariably get berated by Mike for solving the problem instead of "just getting the network link back up."  Such "WTF?" events were just every-day normality; they were at once both hilarious and horrifying.  After one particularly embarrassing pairing of technical misdiagnoses and political fumbling on his part which I untangled in order to get a customer unstuck, he pulled me out for a "walk" around the office park outside.  During the conversation that took place there, he asked me to stop breaking the curve.  He wanted me to sandbag on service delivery; instead of actually fixing problems, he wanted me to help him get as much political gain for "the IT department" (really for Mike, there was no upside in it for me) out of each interaction with each internal customer as possible.  When I tried to explain why I believed that was a poor idea, he called me, sarcastically, a "man of the people" as if I was some sort of effete socialist for actually doing the job the company had hired me to do instead of withholding services for personal gain.  Since he had himself found and hired me, I suspect he thought I owed him my unquestioning allegiance, and he was extremely disappointed that he did not have it.  Unsurprisingly, we began to dislike each other personally.

Mike was in charge of a small budget and he would attempt make our vendors, no matter how loyal they were, jump through absurd hoops to obtain simple repeat business.  I felt particularly badly for Don, the 3Com sales representative, who would need to continually run Mike's gauntlet.

"Mike, we need another branch router for the new site."

"Hmm, OK.  I'll have to get Don in here."

"Well, we already have 30 of them, we really just need another one.  I know the part number.  Does Don really need to come out for that?"

"Don needs to show up; this is what he gets paid for."

Not only would such a meeting require Don's attendance, it would also require *my* attendance.  Such meetings, besides meetings of the four members of our tiny little department, I guess were the only kind that Mike could call, and he really did love calling them.  These meetings were truly cringeworthy.  In such a meeting, Mike, like a minor Mafia capo, would tell Don that he felt that 3Com owed him some free thing or another, and that, oh, by the way, he had been talking to the Cisco representative lately, and that Don wouldn't want anything to happen to his precious ISA income now, would he? Putting this sort of competetive pressure on vendors probably did reduce expense, but the sums could never have justifed the manpower cost of the meetings, especially because the purchase volume was so low.  These vendor meetings were literally a waste of time for all involved.  I certainly never had any idea why I was at any of them, because I never spoke, and I was never asked for any input.  But I went to many of them.  The sooner I showered after each, the better I felt.

As a department, ours was the only one not truly pulling its weight, and the great majority of our failures were due directly to Mike's political sandbagging.  Other departments would clearly do anything to not deal with ours; they'd pull money together out of petty cash to get parts, or they'd fix their own equipment.  They'd try to buttonhole Mike's staff instead of dealing with Mike directly, but our hands were usually tied.  I had never experienced this level of pettiness at a job, and I was mortified.  Over time, my ability to handle the situation in good spirits decreased dramatically.  When I first started the job, most of Mike's machinations were just comical, but after a few months I could no longer see any humor in them.  I thought Mike's incompetence and transparently shady deals made me and the two other guys who reported to Mike look like buffoons too.  I had too much dumb pride; I couldn't laugh it off, and I didn't want to look like a fool.  I had never before been so actively prevented from doing the right thing so regularly, especially by someone I had so little respect for.  It was utterly maddening.  I would, I'm ashamed to say, complain endlessly to anyone who would listen, especially my immediate coworkers and my friends.  It was just not a healthy situation at all.  I desperately wanted to not have Mike as a boss anymore but there was nowhere within the company to move to; I didn't possess the necessary experience to be an ISA programmer, and I wasn't really interested in the sort of fat-client development they were doing anyway.  There was no other IT position available at ISA in which Mike would not be my boss, and nothing else in the company really interested me.  I really should have quit immediately rather than stay on and seed dissent but I didn't.  Instead, I stayed, seeding dissent liberally, although I began to look around for another job on the sly.  As it turned out, I would find reason to leave without finding another job within a couple of months.  In the meantime, it got personal.

In 1996, the Web was a reasonably new technology.  ISA did not have a website.  I knew almost nothing about the web.  I had used it, of course, but from a development standpoint I more or less was at ground zero.  I wasn't much of a developer; all of my true experience was with systems adminstration.  I had played a bit with Perl and BASIC, and various application programming languages but I was a complete web development noob.  Over the course of several weekends, I had taught myself enough HTML (who needs CSS!?) to produce a set of static web pages for the company.  The home page was hideous black with white text.  It had two spinning American flags and played music -- some sort of MIDI rendition of the American national anthem, IIRC -- when you visited it.  It may have rendered properly in Netscape Navigator 1 and IE 2.0, or maybe only one of those. It was by any measure, even for its time, truly god-awful.  But I had worked hard on it because I was interested in knowing how the web worked.  It was done on my own time, and, as tragic as I knew the website was, I was proud of it, because, at the time, it truly was the best I could do.  The fact that I happened to use ISA as the topic of the web site was only because I had no other convenient content source.

At the office, the Monday after my final weekend of working on the website, I was showing the website to my two other department mates.  They were politely attempting to avoid telling me how terrible it was, while, in a fit of stupidity, I inadvertently also let Mike see it.  His eyes flashed.

"Let me have a copy of that.  Do not show this to anyone else."

The way he said this, it seemed like I was in some sort of trouble.  I didn't really understand why, but I didn't much care either.  It was just easiest to do as he asked.  I gave him a floppy disk with the HTML and graphics on it, and I showed him how to bring it up in his browser. And with that, he was gone for some number of hours.  Mike came back that afternoon, and did not make any more comments about the website.  He mentioned that he had a meeting of department heads scheduled for the folllowing morning.

On Tuesday, I arrived late.  The department head meeting had already begun, and I happened to walk past the open conference room door.  Mike was presenting my horrid ISA website to the other department heads, projected on a large screen.  "Fine," I rationalized.  "Whatever.  At least maybe they'll know I did it, and geez maybe I'll have a shot at eventually being able to move over to the programming group doing web stuff or something."  But later, smoking outside, after the meeting had ended but before I had yet seen Mike, I asked one of the other department heads (a fellow smoker) if he had liked the website, he sort of looked at me quizically and said "well, it's kind of nasty."  I laughed and agreed, but as we conversed it became clear that he had no idea that I had been its original author.  Mike had simply passed off my work as his own.  I had seen movies with a similar storyline, but I'm not Anne Hathaway.  I didn't think it would actually happen to me in real life.  Would he really be so stupid as to pass off that steaming pile as his own work?  Did he think I'd not find out?  Or that I would not care, maybe?  Apparently, he felt he would get some sort of gain from presenting it as his own.  My immediate conversation with Mike after I found this out went something like this:

"Mike, you showed my website to the department heads this morning, right?"

"Um, yes.  They liked it.  We might put a website up soon."

"I didn't really expect that.  Do they know who did it?"

"Sure, yes."

"Ken told me he didn't know."

"<pause> Oh.  Well maybe he didn't hear me mention it.  Or I might have said it was done 'by the department'."

"Well, it was not done by the department, right?  It was done by me.  Why did you think it was OK to show them the website at all?  I thought you were just going to use it as some sort of personal learning example or something."

"Well, you gave it to me."

"I did.  But I didn't give you permission to present it to the company.  Definitely not as your own company-time work.  Did you tell them you had spent money on it or something?"

"Well, your work here belongs to the department.  And what I told them isn't really your business."

"But I didn't do it here, I did it at home.  I wasn't asked to do it, and I sure didn't get paid anything extra to do it."

"That's not really relevant."

And so, while Mike may have been technically within ISA HR rules to steal my hideous website work and pass it off as his own, doing so was a first-class dick move, and he handled it about as poorly as anyone could have.  My distaste for him was then truly solidified, and at this point, despite his obvious emotional handicaps, I stopped feeling badly for him almost entirely.  I stepped up my efforts to find another job, and I did the absolute minimum possible to communicate with him, usually ignoring his commands.  Instead, I just did what I thought was right.  This infuriated him regularly, and it made for a pretty tense work environment, but I didn't care.  As far as I was concerned, Mike was an obstacle to be worked around, not a boss; something which needed to be managed like a force of nature instead of a fellow human being.

Because Mike was so ignorant about the technology we were managing, and because he was so widely disliked and distrusted, he was an easy target for minor pranks.  As previously mentioned, one of the only times Mike would get concerned about providing service is when a point-to-point link connecting our central office with a remote was reported down.  Our network monitoring situation was very ad-hoc for a while.  So, wisely, he had a contractor come in and install an enormous HP system on his desk which ran HP OpenView, a fashionable network monitoring system of the time.  It showed all of the remote offices connected to the central office by lines.  When all was normal, each of these lines was green.  If one of the links went down, the line turned red.  Mike was very proud to have this mission-control looking thing on his desk, even if he couldn't really understand how to fix what it was telling him.  It did help; we began to know about problems before we got calls about them, and I was able to fix them more quickly.  The installation of this system was a bit of a chore, because it required turning TCP/IP on at each of the remote office routers as well as the large central office router.  We didn't have TCP/IP enabled on any router before that, because literally all business happened over Novell's IPX.  I was the person who had to turn on TCP/IP on each of about 30 routers to make this monitoring possible.  With a bit of effort, it got done, and Mike subsequently created an edict which prohibited anyone but himself from using TCP/IP for any business purpose internally, citing support concerns.  So the only traffic that happened over TCP/IP was literally this HP OpenView monitoring traffic, a combination of SNMP and ICMP.  TCP/IP could stop flowing entirely, and the "real" business would continue working without a hitch.  The only thing that would happen when IP stopped flowing was that the screen of Mike's mission control console would light up like a fleet of ambulances.

I felt it my moral duty to make the best of this temporary situation.  I had access to all the routers, and I could configure them on the fly without much difficulty and without fear of reprisal, as there was no auditing at all.  After the OpenView system became a fixture on Mike's desk, every day, at least once a day, for a week or so, I would quietly turn off TCP/IP entirely at the central office 3Com ingress router.  Immediately after I did this, Mike's massive OpenView screen would turn completely red and begin to beep angrily.  It would appear that every link -- more than 30 of them -- had gone down simultaneously.  This was like perfoming puppetry on a grand scale, becuse every time I did this, Mike would stand bolt upright at his desk and yell "THE NETWORK IS DOWN!" at astounding volume, startling everyone in the room (except me, of course, I was sufficiently braced), and look around the room accusingly.  He'd then pace around the room, sweating, stopping to hover over me every so often.  Mike was unable to fix anything; he just didn't have any knowledge, and so pacing and panicking was the extent of his contribution when anything broke.  So, loving every delicious moment of Mike's impotence, I'd feign surprise and pretend to be confused for several minutes, typing gibberish on my keyboard as he paced, watching him get more and more red-faced from anguish.  Finally, right before Mike seemed ready to go into cardiac arrest, I'd turn TCP/IP back on and everything would go green again.  Mike would then see it and invariably shout "IT'S BACK UP!"  and sit down heavily in his chair, looking pale.  He'd tell me to "look into it".  I'd type more gibberish for a few more minutes, then sort of shrug, pretending I didn't know what had happened either.  "Nothing in the logs, Mike!"  Eventually, when the emergency had lost Mike's attention, I'd give the other two guys in our department a wink.  They loved it too.  Only once he started to call AT&T and other vendors reporting "spurious problems with links" did I stop taking IP down so regularly.  I would then only do it occasionally thereafter when it felt truly righteous.  It eventually became impossible for me to do this at all after Mike was overruled and the company started to use TCP/IP for things other than OpenView, which saddened me greatly.  In retrospect, I was undoubtedly a passive-agressive dick for messing around with Mike like this, because it wasn't a friendly razzing: it was done out of malice; the joke was always on him and I never told him about it.  I rationalized that he deserved every moment of it.  Fair or unfair, the IP downages certainly provided our downtrodden group with badly-needed source of comedy, made even more entertaining because it was at Mike's expense.

One of our largest customers was Coors Brewing, in Golden, Colorado.  In 1996, Coors was to be one of the first (the very first, possibly) of our customer sites that would receive a Windows NT 4 server rather than a Novell NetWare server to handle inventory tracking.  I don't remember if the clients connected to it via IP or still via IPX but the client software stack hadn't changed much from a functionality point of view.  Our department was tasked with providing a Windows NT 4 server that we'd configure with the server side of our application stack, and then ship to Golden.  A few days after the server shipped, we'd be travelling to Golden, visiting the factory in order to hook it up as part of a larger software upgrade.  Uncharacteristically, Mike treated this particular server preparation job with some importance.  He was fascinated by Windows NT on some unhealthy manager-porn level, continually proclaiming it to be much more reliable than the NetWare servers we had always worked with.  Mike was certainly in no position to make an informed judgment about this, and it turned out to be rather untrue.  But as a result, presumably, of this fascination, Mike did an unusual amount of work towards setting it up.  To Mike's credit, with only occasional help from one of us on his staff, and some loud, cringe-inducing phone support calls in which he drove hapless helpdesk engineers marginally insane by faking superior knowledge, he managed to get Windows NT installed on a hefty Compaq machine, and with some help from ISA programmers, he managed to get the proper server components installed.  Unlike the NetWare systems we usually configured, the Windows server had a graphical adminstration UI which did not require a keyboard to navigate.  This meant Mike could click on things rather than type commands, which provided him with the illusion that he understood what he was doing.  He enjoyed this newfound sense of control immensely, which was good news for us, because it distracted him, and we were able to get other things done that Coors would requre.  After a few days, the server actually worked, and we shipped it off to Golden, along with other miscellaneous datacomm equipment, cabling, and so forth.

With Mike and five or six other folks from ISA, I shipped out to Golden a few days later.  We were to be there for three days.  The Coors brewery is a very neat place.  The surrounding mountains were beautiful.  The brewery generated its own power without consuming any from the municipal grid (don't ask me to recall how... belch power?).  The girls in Denver and Golden were pretty.  We had buffalo burgers and visited some downtown Denver bars on off hours.  We even got to take the beer tour, walking amongst huge vats of Coors, and received a cup of beer at the end that was fresh from the process.  I actually had a lot of fun for the first couple of days, tasked with running cabling, setting up machinery physically, and making sure that machines at separate physical locations could talk to each other over Coors' internal cabling system.  On the third day, however, it went to hell.

On the first day, we had set up Mike's NT server in a wiring closet somewhere in the bowels of the brewery, and, on the third day, it was doing its job, except that the system was performing very, very slowly.  All client machines were passing inventory change input to the server at a snail's pace.  We were all baffled.  The speed issue was a deal-killer and we were due to leave at the end of the day.  If it didn't get solved very quickly, we'd either all need to stay, or we'd all look very bad.  Coors was also losing faith, deeply worried that the system was not yet working.  They'd been promised that it would be working at noon on the second day, and at noon on the third, it was not.  A Coors employee wandered into the room, looking for a status update, and stayed there amongst us while we debugged things. The pressure made things slightly uncomfortable.  Mike dealt with this pressure by creating progressively more unlikely theories about the cause of the failure and barking out orders that others investigate them, regardless of their logical merit.  "It must be the software," he claimed, without any specifics.  Then he magically discerned that it must be all of the network cards, that we must have "gotten a bad batch."  We chased that theory pointlessly for a while.  After a few other failures of deductive logic, he finally settled on blaming the datacomm equipment and cabling between the closet and the client machines.  I was skeptical of Mike's final diagnosis, not only because I had absolutely no respect for Mike's technical ability, but because I saw no evidence of dropped packets between other systems in the closet and our current location.  We had also already switched cable drops with a known-working customer system in the same room in order to isolate the problem.  But I agreed that pulling the server closer, into the room where we were gathered was the logically best next debugging task because it also meant we could take a look at the server physically while the problem was happening.

At 3pm, we pulled the machine from its closet and set it up in the same room as a couple of client machines, connected to the same hub.  Surprisingly, immediately after doing this, the system performed flawlessly for about half an hour.  It seemed as if, indeed, Mike was actually right, and some sort of data communications heisenproblem related to routing equipment or cabling was causing the issue.  Satisfied with himself, over the next 30 minutes, Mike shot triumphant looks at me, probably mentally preparing to make me stay and recable the entire building.  This was truly bad news, because I was confident that it would be for naught.  I had already acquitted all of the systems related to routing and cabling by logical exclusion, and there were no further debugging or remediation steps to be done there.  But then, suddenly, wham!, the system started to slow down again, despite the fact it was in the same room and only 20 feet of cabling or so and a single hub separated client and server.  At Mike's insistence, we replaced the hub which connected the two.  The system still performed slowly.  Then we replaced the cables which connected the server and the client to the hub.  The system still perfomed slowly.  Mike's self-satisfied air turned to one of bitter disbelief.  I was relieved, because though I already knew that the problem wasn't cabling or electronics, I was happy that we had collectively isolated the problem further, reducing the chances that we'd need to do another witch hunt unrelated to actual debugging logic.

My brain was still turning.  By moving the server and client closer together, we had removed any shadow of doubt about intermediate electronics and cabling.  If cabling and routing was not the issue, what could it be?  Well, it had to be either a software issue, a server hardware issue, or a or load issue.  The software had performed acceptably in Pennsylvania, and the programmers hadn't been making arbitrary software changes.  It couldn't logically be a load issue, because the only client connected to the machine was now a single one: a debugging terminal which the programmers had sort of naturally gathered around to use to provoke and study the issue.  The server was beefy enough, and the software efficient enough, that it should have been able to handle dozens, perhaps hundreds, of simultaneous users.  We would have to do a little bit of research to come up with another theory.

The debugging terminal was around a corner from the place we'd set up the server after pulling it out of its wiring closet.  Alone, I wandered over to the server while the slowdown was isolated.  As I walked around a corner towards the server, I noticed that it was showing the ubiquitous "Pipes" 3D screen saver.  I hit the shift key, and everyone who was gathered around the debugging terminal said almost immediately "Whoa!  It's fast again!"  The mystery had been solved.  Mike had configured the server with a pretty, but crippling screensaver which consumed most of the server's available CPU time to render.  This made the server, and thus the inventory system, unusably slow whenever the screensaver was active.  We just needed to disable it.  I mentally rolled my eyes.

Nobody else had correlated my key-tap on the server's keyboard with the solution.  Realizing no one but me yet knew what the problem was, I kept my mouth shut.  No good would come of reporting this misconfiguration loudly while a Coors employee was in the room.  I took Mike aside into the corner near the server and said "Mike, the problem is that the server has this screensaver on it; disabling it will make it all good."  He glared at me skeptically.  Slowly his demeanor changed as he realized that, yes, he *had* put that cool-looking screensaver on the box, and that, because he had configured it all himself, he was the natural cause of this minor fiasco.  He then said, conspiratorially, "Don't do anything, and don't tell anyone about this yet."  I did exactly that.  I said nothing to anyone, assuming that Mike would quickly notify whomever needing notification that the problem was solved, in whatever face-saving manner he needed to use.

Opportunely, the Coors employee left our room temporarily almost immediately after I pressed the shift key.  I think the "it works, now it doesn't, now it works again" uncertainty of the system state and the ad-hoc nature of Mike's debugging process was beginning to give him grave doubts of our competence, and he just needed some alone time, or maybe a drink.  The ISA programmers were still in the dark, huddled around the debugging terminal, theorizing to themselves about why the system had become again responsive.  Mike began to poke at the server himself, while I looked on.  After he (very quickly) convinced himself of my diagnosis, I could see Mike's self-preservation wheels start to turn.  He realized that he did not have enough time to make up a lie.  Even if he might have time, he simply didn't have the required skill to make up a credible one.  So he made his decision.  Mike wheeled around the corner and stated, with misplaced bravado, to the now customer-unburdened, but still confused ISA programmers that the issue was probably related to a screensaver taking up too much CPU time, and that he had disabled it.  They all just sort of laughed ruefully, believing him, understanding that this was a stupid mistake, but glad to have some sort of explanation.  And then Mike left the room.  Despite my dislike of him, I once again felt a little sorry for him.  The screensaver had no place being enabled on the server, but in truth it was hard to blame Mike for not being omniscient.  It was our first deployment of this kind, and, if anything, it just proved that having a full Windows GUI on a server was a poor idea (as it is even today), but no one would have listened to that; Microsoft marketing was just too powerful and still is.  Still, I admit, it was entertaining to see Mike get hoisted up by his own ignorance-stained petard, after he had been casting blame without benefit of any scientific method all day.

After the programmers convinced themselves that everything was again working without issue, we quietly moved the server back into the wiring closet.  The Coors employee reentered our room, again looking for a status update.  The programmers enthusiastically told him that we now had the issue fixed, and told him how it had been fixed.  He looked relieved, and stuck around to chat with the programmers, smiling widely, all forgiven.  It felt like we were in the clear.  With the emergency now behind us, and not much else to do but to tie up some loose ends, I started to work on some datacomm documentation issues.  Idly, without thinking about it, I used an open laptop, closer to me than my own, to telnet to a router and I performed some basic commands to get some addressing information, which I scribbled on to a piece of paper.  It took me about 30 seconds.  With that, I walked across the room, and began to transcribe some of my scribblings into a text editor on my own laptop.  Shortly thereafter, Mike finally came back into the room after an unreasonably lengthy absence, sat down, and worked at his laptop for a few minutes.  He then, in a strange voice, seemingly out of the blue, yelled angrily "WHO HAS BEEN USING MY LAPTOP?"  Due to the presence of the lingering Coors employee, the timing of Mike's outburst was awkward for all of us.  All the ISA employees in the room looked embarrassed.  The Coors employee looked shocked.  At first, because I had used it so casually, it didn't even register that it had been Mike's laptop that I had used.  Then, a few moments later, it dawned on me that I had indeed, shortly before, used a laptop that was not mine, and Mike now had that same laptop sitting in front of him.  I said, "I think it might have been me."

"You used my laptop?"

"Yeah, I telnetted to a router."

"THAT IS NOT OK.  YOU DO NOT USE MY LAPTOP.  FOLLOW ME."

Mike pointed to a small office in the corner of the larger room we were all gathered in.  He was shouting.  The Coors representative had a look of horror on his face.  I was deeply embarrassed for all of us.  I got up from my chair, and went into the office.  Mike followed.  As soon as we entered the office, Mike said to me:

"I'm sorry, this just isn't working out, you're constantly disobeying me.  Using my laptop was the last straw.  It has important information on it that you are not allowed to see.  I'm going to have to let you go."

I must admit that even before I entered the office, I was in a minor rage.  He was embarrassing himself, me, and our company in front of a customer by taking public disciplinary action against an employee.  It was made worse by the fact that, unbeknownst to anyone but Mike, that employee had just successfully diagnosed an actual problem and had handled reporting it with a great deal of tact.  I really had no idea whether my use of his laptop was a fireable offense, but I also knew it did not matter.  I imagined the reason he was coming down on me was simply because I had found a problem that he had caused.  That I had been right, and he had been wrong.  By firing me, he was, somehow, in his twisted head, settling a score between us.  As I realized I had just been fired for doing so incontravertably the right thing, I became truly enraged.  I'd never been so angry with a single person before.  I tried to keep my voice down, because I didn't want to further embarrass myself or the company in front of our customer, and I knew the office walls were thin.  I was shaking uncontrollably and I took a step towards him and, with no lack of emotion, said:

"Fuck you you cocksucking fuck!  You have got to be fucking kidding me.  You're fucking unbelievable.  I told *no one* about your fuckup."

At this point Mike looked at me with a combination of suprise and fear, half-covered his face with his arms and -- I shit you not -- uttered these exact words:

"Don't hurt me, I have kids."

What?  Even at the time, despite my immense anger, I found this plea funny, sad, and deeply confusing.  It made no sense.  I would never have physically hurt Mike.  I'm not much of a brawler.  I've only been in two fights in my life, and I lost both of them.  I took a step back and put my hands on my chest.  I must have had a puzzled look on my face.  Once Mike realized I wasn't actually going to hit him, he took his arms down from over his head.  His face had the look of a child after getting reprimanded by a mother, scared, defeated, and ashamed.  At that very point, any semblance of a boss-employee relationship between the two of us evaporated.  The truth had been revealed: Mike was just a pitiful miniature Hitleresque man-child that I had caught red-handed in a sordid little scheme to get rid of evidence that might harm his career.  When caught, rather than take responsibility, he hid behind his *kids*.  Still quaking with anger, although with slightly less emotion, I berated him some more.  He did not respond.  Instead, he began to sniffle quietly.  He was crying.  With no shortage of righteous indignation and disgust, I walked out of the little office, and sat back down in the chair I had vacated once again.  I was adrenaline-filled, ashamed of myself for losing it, embarrassed for our company, and in complete amazement.  What had just happened?  I was fired, that was for sure.  Thank god.  I was relieved.  There's no way I could work for Mike anymore.  But good lord, that had been weird.

Surprisingly, as I was processing the situation, Mike walked up behind me, and, with his best tough-guy voice belied by the tears welling in his eyes, said "pack up your stuff and get out of here."  The ISA staff and the Coors representative were all slack-jawed at this point, staring at this torrid scene.  Although I really did not want to cause more of a scene, irationally, I was also determined to not do anything Mike told me to do ever again, no matter how sensible.  I resolved to myself that I'd leave when I was good and ready.  I replied, "No."  Mike repeated his request and I told him, grimly and determinedly, that I'd leave when I finished what I had started, and no sooner, and that he'd just have to deal with it.  I was still shaking.  Mike could tell that he was going to need to call security to get me out of that room.  He suddenly dropped the tough guy act.  His tone softened noticeably, and he asked me to come back into the office where I'd just berated him, and where he had just emasculated himself.  Warily, I followed him.  When we got back into the office, Mike ran his hand nervously through his hair, wiped his face, and said:

"OK, some things back happened there.  I think maybe I overreacted.  I shouldn't have fired you."

I stared at him, mouth open in amazement.

"No shit.  Wait.  Are you telling me you're *un-firing* me?  Five minutes after you fired me and asked me not to hurt you because you have kids?  And 30 seconds after you ordered me to leave the building?  And ... Mike, you're crying?"

"Yes.  I was wrong.  I'm sorry."

At this point, it all started to make sense.  When Mike had been missing from the room for an unreasonable amount of time after we had fixed the slowness issue, he had been on the phone.  Mike had contacted his boss, and he had told him about the affair as a sort of preemptive strike.  Because I knew the truth, and the truth did not favor Mike, maybe he intended to make this minor screensaver-caused slowness issue his own mini-Waterloo, telling folks the exact opposite of the truth in order to both cover his own ass and to conveniently also get me fired.  I surmised that Mike had told him that I had installed the offending screensaver, and that he had diagnosed it as the problem and disabled it.  I doubt it had ever occurred to Mike that, if he had just told the truth, it would have all but certainly just passed without issue.  Maybe he was just sick of being proven wrong all the time.  Maybe he just felt it was time to get rid of me, and he saw an opportunity.  Maybe he had steeled himself during his walkabout for the messy and inconvenient HR machinations it would take to get through whatever lies he intended to tell to cover himself.  Who knows.

But when he got back from his ass-covering mission, his lizard brain fell upon an easier solution: he saw a terminal window open on his laptop with router commands in it, and he knew it must have been me who had been using it, as I was the person there responsible for configuring datacomm stuff.  Instead of going through with some messy, risky technical blamefest back in the office, he could just fire me immediately for using his laptop instead!  Problem solved!  But he hadn't counted on his emotions getting so high, and he was beginning to realize that by taking this tact, because we were so visibly arguing, and because he was so visibly shaken, that he risked having to explain himself to his higher-ups when we got back, which would include admitting that a Coors representative was present in the room while this whole sordid ordeal took place, and this might be reason for termination itself, for both me *and* for him.

I stood there for several moments, staring at Mike, this sick realization dawning on me all at once.  Amazed at the shabby, transparent absurdity of the whole thing, I shook my head, laughed and said, "Fuck you, dick, I quit."  I didn't have enough empathy left for Mike to forgive him, and I certainly couldn't work for him anymore.  I left the office, and went back to my chair.  I stayed for the rest of the day onsite, slowly coming down from the adrenaline caused by my rage, ignoring Mike completely.  That wasn't hard, because he made himself scarce except when truly required to be present.  We left Golden that evening, job completed successfully save for our truly unprofessional behavior.  The customer was happy, and we were all glad to not have to be staying there away from home any longer.

Once I got back home, unsurprisingly, I didn't see Mike much.  Some time later, at my ISA exit interview (I wasn't fired, but I did indeed quit), I angrily told the whole shabby story to Jim, Mike's boss.  Unfortunately, Mike was not fired as a result.  Possibly he wasn't even reprimanded.  Maybe Jim didn't believe me.  I'd like to think, though, that Jim probably believes me now.  There's no way someone could be Mike's boss and not notice Mike's erratic, paranoid, slimy behavior.  I was out of work for maybe three weeks or so thereafter.  I went on to get a job doing computer security.  I don't actually know what happened to Mike.  Maybe he still works at ISA.  In any case, here's to you, Mike.  I still pity you, and I do hope you've gotten some help, but I can't help but think you're probably, even now, making some other poor subordinate miserable.