Welcome Party for Dave (Part I)

Miraculously, Bob did something right! Oh, he resisted, he tried to do the wrong thing, you can be sure of that. In fact he did so many wrong things leading up to it, that he hardly deserves any credit at all. But it turned out right in the end, and I suppose, that’s what matters.

Since Bob started as our manager, everyone has had a lot more work to do. Of course, that’s the opposite of what should have happened. But by now, I hope you realize that Bob is not simply a drain on our sensibility, but on our productivity as well. Countless hours were spent researching some new, horribly impractical technology that Bob wanted us to implement. Bob’s initiatives, literally reeking with an overwhelming stench of incompetence, were consistent only in their absolute absurdity. One day he would demand that we purchase the most expensive enterprise solutions (the kind owned by investment banks and global companies with an IT staff roughly one thousand times the size of ours). The next day he would have us completely re-engineer readily available and completely affordable software. We were so busy working on his mindless projects while trying to fulfill our obligation to our clients that we didn’t even have the time to question his madness.

And while it was quite obvious that there was a conscious, often malicious motive behind Bob’s actions, it did seem that sometimes he created so much work for us out of utter stupidity, and an inability to understand the sort of basic concepts that a six year old with a computer would have no difficulty grasping.

One afternoon he approached myself and Marek with a demand that defied logic.

“Give me a backup of everything,” he said with the kind of authority that an insane person should never have.
“What?” we said simultaneously.
“Backups. You know, of our stuff. I need them. It’s very important.”

As Bob walked away with a confident gait, Marek looked at me with pure desperation in his eyes.

“My English is not so good, Anna.”
“I don’t even think he was speaking English,” I shrugged.
“What does he mean, ‘backup of everything,’ it makes no sense.”
“No argument from me.”
“He is not normal, not sane. It is sentence that means nothing.”
“Look, maybe if we pretend that the conversation never happened, he will forget all about it.”

A sound plan. We banked on the fact that Bob’s brain didn’t operate like the brain of a normal human being, and hoped that he would become absorbed with yet another psychotic endeavor, and leave us alone, at least briefly. But the next day, Bob approached us again.

“So, how about that backup? Is it done yet?” he said this as if he were asking for a cup of tea and some toast.
“A backup of what?”
“Of everything! Don’t you remember? I need a backup of everything!”

I could see sweat forming on Marek’s forehead. I marveled at his self control, and wondered whether he was practicing zen meditation when he wasn’t hacking into the Pentagon.

“Bob.” He was speaking slowly, enunciating every syllable. “Do you know the meaning of words, back-up and eve-ry-thing?”
“What?” Bob was laughing, he was clearly in good spirits, and Marek’s accent often amused him.
“Backup. Everything.” Marek repeated even slower. I saw a few blood vessels rupture, and his left eye began to twitch violently. I knew that I had to intervene.
“Now look, Bob. What you are asking just doesn’t make sense,” I said. “You can’t have a backup of everything. You need a backup of a particular thing at a particular time.”
“I need a backup of all our servers for all time.” So, he knew that we had servers. I underestimated Bob. But he clearly didn’t understand the passage of time, so perhaps I still had an advantage.
“That’s impossible, Bob. Can’t be done.” It was one of those times when you begin regretting what you said before you even finish saying it.
“Can’t be done!” He didn’t say it like a question, and I knew what was coming. “You are one of those people who say NO all the time. No, we can’t write our own operating system! No, we can’t have a backup of everything! People hate that! You impede progress!”
“Ok, we’ll do it.” Marek gave me a classic crazy-girl-what-are-you-doing look. “Come back next Wednesday.”

The following Wednesday, we didn’t have a backup of everything, but neither did we have Bob. Jason the Intern told me about an anime convention in New Jersey on Wednesday afternoon, and I expected (correctly) that Bob would not miss a chance to add to his manga collection.

Marek gave me a look of admiration, as we read Bob’s email that morning.

From: Bob Bossman
To: sitg-staff@bpu.edu
Subject: Sprained back

I will not be able to come in to work today. I sprained my back last night during my tango lesson. I was trying a very advanced move with my partner, who is a professional ballroom dancer. I won’t be answering my phone.

Sincerely,
Bob

That was even more proof that he was at the anime convention! I noticed a trend – whenever Bob was involved in a particularly geeky activity, his excuse always portrayed him doing something glamorous and sexy. A Magic the Gathering tournament became a cocktail party with hip friends, a Star Trek fan fiction event became a date with a European fashion model, and an anime convention became a tango lesson with a professional dancer.

When Bob returned to work on Thursday, he forgot about his outlandish backup request, and left us alone. Unfortunately, Bob forgot to mention that we were in violation of a university mandate to have redundant copies of our backups stored in an off-site location. He received the notice about our lack of compliance along with a detailed write-up of the policy. He compressed the forty page document into three incongruous words – backup of everything. So, when we learned about the violation, Marek and I had to postpone all our other projects and commitments, and scramble to make duplicates of critical backups to be sent off site along with other disaster recovery tools and documents.

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