One Fateful Morning
A number of years back, I was working for a company that had been around for many years. I was only relatively new myself but there were still a couple of “old guard” senior engineers around who had been there from the start. The kind that knows where all the obscure, undocumented insider stuff is and can fix most problems in five seconds that the rest of us might take hours to solve.
One of the guys in particular, who I shall refer to as Joe, was a bearded and jovial gent with a very Steve Wozniak persona. He was always happy for us to approach him with our questions and welcomed us to leverage his VAST knowledge of how the company’s sprawling IT infrastructure worked to make our lives easier and cope with the constant unrealistic expectations of upper management.
He was a real, old-school engineer—someone who loved their job and was well respected by everyone around the department. So when his friend the current department head, a man of comparable knowledge and experience, retired and was replaced from the outside with a young and brash one with a business degree and little technical knowledge who was also called Joe, it was a big change for everyone. Fortunately for us he didn’t interfere too much with the technical aspects of our day-to-day jobs at first. But then things started to change.
When the company first started out, they weren’t too concerned with formality when it came to e-mail address policy. In later years as the company had grown, they tightened the bolts with an official policy of issuing staff with a longer, more formal address, but those who were around from the early days retained their original, shorter addresses as an alias.
It was somewhat of a status symbol and sign of authority in the company to have one, and those that did would use that version as their sending address and proudly have it in their e-mail signatures and on their business cards. The retired head had one such address, as did my old Joe in the form of joe@company.com.
You always knew when you saw an e-mail come into the inbox from somebody with one of these addresses that they were someone important who had been around for a while. Most of the department heads were long-term employees who used them, and it wasn’t long before the new IT head noticed this aspect of our corporate culture and clearly envied his peers.
But as a new employee, he was stuck with his formal e-mail address and they weren’t issuing new legacy e-mail addresses of this kind unless they were for someone way up the food chain. Even as head of IT, he had no authority to claim one, which is why when one day he spotted an e-mail from Joe using his legacy address, he came up with a malicious plan. He saw an opportunity to get what he was coveting.
So as the tale goes, he called Joe into his office and had an exchange that went something like this:
IT Head: “Hey Joe, great work on the capacity report and getting it to me so quickly. We should be able to get approval from finance to expand our storage way sooner than I thought”
Joe: “Not a problem, is there anything else you needed from me for it”?
IT Head: “Nope, everything is their thanks. But I happened to notice when you sent it through you were using a different e-mail address—a little different from the rest of the team”.
Joe: “Yes, that’s the one I’ve always used from when I started and everyone here knows to reach me at. Also some of our older systems and scripts we still use from the early days were hard coded to use it as well so I’m still actively using it to get critical alerts”.
IT Head: “I’ve got no problem with that, but I was interested in getting one of those kind of addresses for me. It would make it easier for people to, you know, know I’m the head of this department rather than just another employee here. My predecessor had one so it should be no problem for me to have one as well too, right? Can you make that happen”?
Joe: “I’m sorry, I wish I could but it’s HR that makes that decision and it’s their policy is to only issue personal addresses at the top corporate domain level now for C-level recruits and their immediate assistants”.
IT Head: “You’ve been here for a long time, surely there isn’t a way or someone you know who can make this happen”?
Joe: “I’m sorry, it’s a decision way above my pay grade. I’d be happy to put a request in for you to the head of HR to see if they could do it as a favor, but I’m pretty certain what their answer will be”.
IT Head: (Annoyed) “Ok thanks, do it and let’s see what happens”
Joe goes and logs the request, but of course the head of HR knocks it back, citing policy and not wanting to set a precedent even as a favor to Joe. Joe goes back to give the IT Head the bad news:
Joe: (Knocks) “Hey, you know that request I put through to try and get you a top-level e-mail address? Unfortunately HR have knocked it back. I did my best to try and push it through but they were firm on our current corporate policy of not issuing any new ones except for those at the very top”.
IT Head: (Visibly unhappy) “I’m sorry to hear that, are you sure you did everything you could”?
Joe: “Yes, it’s out of either of our hands unfortunately”.
IT Head: “Fine then”.
And Joe was right. There was no way the IT Head was going to be issued with a brand-new personal address. But that unfortunately wasn’t the end of it. However, his position did allow him to authorize the reassignment of existing e-mail addresses to staff, which was normally used to forward mail and alerts still being sent internally to staff who had left the company.
He soon realized this was possible and formed another plan, calling Joe back into his office for another conversation:
IT Head: “Hey Joe, you know how we can’t get new personal e-mail addresses created, but we can still reassign an existing one into my name, right”?
Joe: (Frowning) “We can do that, yes. You have the authority to have the e-mail address of anyone who has left redirected or assigned to anyone else if you so wish. Did you want your predecessor’s address? I mean, we can do it, but it would confuse a lot of people if they saw your e-mail coming from someone who is gone”.
IT Head: “What about e-mail addresses of existing staff”?
Joe: (Frowning harder and seeing where this was going) “You do have the authority, but it would still confuse people and you would be getting all the legacy alerts and notifications, which would make you responsible for ensuring they flow through to the right people when they arrive”.
IT Head: “I think I can handle forwarding a couple of lousy e-mails whenever I see them. I have a greater need for visibility here and there is no business requirement for you to have one, so start the process of transferring joe@company.com across to me immediately. Let me know once it’s done so I can let everyone know”.
So poor Joe was forced to dig his own grave and give up the e-mail address he had held since day one. He definitely wasn’t happy about it but did as he was instructed. Falling back on his regular corporate address, he sent an e-mail out to the immediate team and his contacts to let them know what was happening and to please use his full address moving forward to contact him.
At the same time, the IT Head proudly sent out a company-wide e-mail broadcast letting everyone know that his e-mail address had been updated and he could now be reached at joe@company.com as the Head of IT.
Weeks went by and it was clear he was taking every opportunity to send out e-mails using his new address. New stationary was issued, along with business cards clearly showing his position and contact address. He was clearly reveling in having a coveted address and the prestige and recognition it instantly gave him, especially when dealing with other offices and people who didn’t know he was only a relative newcomer.
Life was good, that is until one fateful morning. It happened when he wasn’t in his office browsing Facebook like he usually would be doing when everyone else arrived. Turned out he had forgotten about his responsibility to forward through important notifications when they can through to him. He had set up a rule to handle them, sure, but not to forward them as promised.
Instead he would delete them directly from his inbox without notice. One particular alert dealt with backup failures for a particularly important and long-term defense contract. One of our key responsibilities was to ensure daily incremental and weekly full backups being performed on one of these old legacy systems that Joe had mentioned to him, both verbally and in writing.
The media in an old backup unit had failed and was repeatedly notifying the issue. It was normally a simple fix, but with no alerts being sent through nobody knew there was a problem. So when a request came through from the client to perform a restore of the previous week’s data after an accidental deletion, the backup team found, to their horror, that no backups had been running for the past several weeks and the data had been lost.
The client was not amused. The CEO with whom they had a close relationship was even less so. Then the IT Head really showed his full colors. He attempted to throw Joe under the bus when word came down that the company was going to incur a MASSIVE fee for the breach. Well, too bad: Joe in his wisdom had ensured he had done a complete “cover your butt” when handing over his e-mail address, including e-mail exchanges with the IT Head highlighting the importance of the alerts and to ensure they went to the right people.
He also included detailed instructions on how to set up forwarding rules and where to send them. All completely ignored. HR policy was specific when it came to important e-mails. It was the clear responsibility of the recipient to ensure they were handled accordingly, and the IT Head had clearly failed in his accepted responsibilities. He didn’t last probation and was gone within the next month.
Everyone was wondering who we would be getting in the position next. HR and management were tight lipped on the topic and there was plenty of speculation within the department about what might happen next. We got an excellent surprise. Everyone was smiling when they walked in on the Monday to see Joe sitting in the IT Head office. In the wake of what happened management decided in their wisdom that the IT Department should have a Head who actually knew something about IT and tapped Joe to take the seat.
He hung on for a few more years before retiring or moving on, but during his tenure he was one of the best IT managers I have ever worked for, and the position didn’t change him from being the friendly, helpful, and supportive teacher that he was. I was sad to see him go but while he was still with u, I always smiled when I saw his e-mails coming through to us from the old, friendly address of joe@company.com, which he had reclaimed and had been returned to its rightful owner.