My “Asshole” Story

I am inspired to relate this story by an earlier post.

Many years ago, I had begun a enterprise-wide Network Engineering position at a Fortune 100 company.

Right off the bat, I got my depertment’s Unix servers and applications under control by getting patches and applications up to date and by implementing proper server security controls. I also fixed and then began the re-jigger the external and internal DNS.

Well, apparently I ruffled some feathers in another geographic area where our company had extensive IT operations.

My boss, the director, came back from a week-long  meeting with the management types at this other location. I had been only working for about 5 weeks.

At our department meeting he described what happened.

My Boss: “So right off they told me that I had two major assholes working for me that I needed to do something about: John Doe and Purple Slog”.

At his point I felt a bit uncomfortable and my boss got very animated and louder in telling the story. He jumped up from his seat at the conference table and related that he said:

“Now wait a minutes, wait a minute! John Doe is not an Asshole!”

Then my boss sat back down, folded his hands in front of him and became silent.