I was recently talking with a colleague about various things, and it conjured up the memory of some things that happened in 2009, back when I worked at Food & Water Watch. It reminded me of how messed up the situation was, and how it ultimately reshaped my position in the organization by coming to its logical conclusion, though it reached that conclusion in the wrong way. This is all water under the bridge now, seeing as none of the parties involved work there anymore, and my old boss, Lane Brooks, is now deceased. I share it as something of a cautionary tale, because this same situation has probably happened to others, and no doubt will occur again in other places.
When I started at Food & Water Watch back in 2007, I was hired as the office manager, which was something of a jack-of-all-trades role for a small organization. Whatever needed to be done, I generally did it. One day, might have been on a ladder removing a ceiling tile to deal with a facilities issue. Another day, I might have been doing IT work. Then after that, I might have been working in the fundraising database. In short, I was the guy that did everything that wasn’t part of a dedicated specialist role.
The IT segment was a fairly large part of my role early on, and while wearing that hat, I provided desktop support for users, maintained organizational email lists, managed the email system, administered the office phone system, maintained all of the various office equipment, and also maintained all of the internal directories for the organizaton. I also served as the primary liaison between the organization and vendors, coordinating efforts with them on various things. I suspect that the desktop support role is why I got the job, because I knew my way around a computer well enough, and also had some (very little) amount of Mac experience, mostly from fooling around on the demo computers at the Apple store at Pentagon City Mall. At the time, Food & Water Watch was an all-Mac office, which I found out later was a very shortsighted decision that they made very early on in order to avoid having to hire a dedicated tech support person. I was never much of a “Mac person”, then as now, but I made do well enough. Anything beyond the desktop was contracted out to a small one-man company that maintained our server and website infrastructure.
That was the status quo for most of my first two years there, and it worked pretty well. I was able to excel in the areas where I was skilled, and in the areas where I was weak, we had contractors performing those functions, and while I picked up a few bits of knowledge from them here and there, I wouldn’t be able to pick the whole thing up and run with it on my own, because it was not my job and wasn’t expected to ever be my job. As the organization continued to grow, I gained additional tools to support my work, such as a remote desktop system that allowed me to do desktop support from my own computer rather than having to physically go over to someone’s desk to look at it. That made me more comfortable, since I didn’t have to sit in someone else’s chair or work at someone else’s desk to resolve their problem. Click, click, fix, and we were good.
Then at the end of 2008, they started looking for a full-time IT guy. I was told that the new IT guy would be a server and infrastructure guy, and that my job functions would be unchanged, i.e. the new guy would largely perform many, but not all, of the functions previously provided by the IT contractor, while I continued to provide desktop support and perform all of my other roles. I would work with the new guy, but his functions were very different from my own. They advertised the job out, but they ultimately filled the position through a headhunter that specialized in IT roles.
As far as onboarding the guy went, my process was pretty standard, except for one thing that directly affected me: I was getting a roommate. The way that Lane saw it, he was moving me out of the strangely-shaped interior office that I didn’t like to an office that was more conventionally shaped and had a window, i.e. he was giving me what I had asked for, but then he decided to move the new IT guy in there with me because our positions were allegedly so similar. So he gave me what I wanted, but then he messed it up by giving me a roommate. I thought I was worth it to continue to have a whole office to myself, but apparently Lane didn’t think so. I was a bit salty about having to share my office, but I managed. After all, this wasn’t like college, where I had to live with the guy all the time. It was just eight hours a day, and then I went back home to the apartment where only I lived. And since I was already working there, I had the advantage of first dibs on the space, so I arranged it the way that I wanted to ensure that my setup fit.
As an aside, the way that I see it, in an office-based organization, office arrangements are something that need to be planned very carefully, and any modifications to someone’s office arrangements should only occur in the upward direction. We didn’t have cubicles, so everyone had a walled office, with different offices’ containing one, two, or three people in them. If someone is to have an office with a roommate, fine – do that when they start so that a double office is the baseline for their position. Once someone is placed in a private office on an ongoing basis, they should not be moved to a double, because that feels like a demotion (remember, a demotion doesn’t always mean a pay cut). Another factor that should be considered is how much people actually use their office. People who are in their office all day every day should probably get their own office, because that is their only workspace. People who are in the field a lot and aren’t at their desk every day can probably get away with doubles since they aren’t there all the time. In my case, I was in the office every day, and I was assigned a private office when I started, i.e. that was my baseline. When we moved buildings in late 2007, I kept my private office. Getting a roommate felt like a big step down, and sent a very strong message about my perceived value to the organization. Whether it was intended or not, it told me that I was not important enough to have a private office. During the 2007 move to a different building in 2007, there was one person who was demoted from a private office to a double. She hated it, and rightly so. And to add insult to injury, they ended up hiring the position that was to have been her work roommate as a much more senior role (i.e. not someone straight out of college), and they were given a private office right out of the gate. After all of that, it was no surprise that they didn’t stick around much longer after that, since it was clear that the organization didn’t value them as much as they thought, and were essentially frozen out of the other position because the way that they advertised it, the job would have been a lateral move, and thus they would have derived no benefit from going after it. If the position had been advertised as a senior role, they might have pursued it as a promotion, though admittedly, at that time, Food & Water Watch didn’t do much as far as promotion from within, i.e. in most cases, whatever you were hired as was what you would always be. Filling a position with an internal candidate was treated as a last resort, settling for an internal hire after they failed to fill it from outside. From where I was standing, it seemed like they screwed them over, and I couldn’t blame them at all for leaving the organization Nothing that I’ve said should be held against the person that they hired for the other role, though. They were lovely and had nothing to do with these decisions. The fault was all on the management side.
When the new IT guy started, things went well enough at first, as he got acquainted with the organization and his own role within it. We sent an all-staff email delineating what the new IT guy’s role was, and who to go to for what issues. In other words, everything that the staff had been going to me for, they needed to continue to go to me for. My weekly meeting with Lane soon became the weekly meeting with Lane and the new IT guy, despite our very different roles. I wasn’t a fan of that, because I felt that I couldn’t be as candid about issues or concerns with a third person in the room, plus our roles were pretty different, so there was very little overlap. The result was that I was losing productive time because of the extra person.
There was also another problem: people were starting to go to the IT guy for desktop support issues. I suppose that it made enough sense in a vacuum, since the thought is that IT means the person who does the computer stuff, so of course, they go there for tech support. But desktop support wasn’t his job. He was the server infrastructure guy. Desktop support was still part of my role, and we told the entire organization that it was still my role. I have always considered part of learning a company to be figuring out who does what, i.e. knowing what functions are in your own sphere, and knowing what functions other people perform as part of their jobs, and respecting those roles, letting each person do their job. In other words, it was about respect for the organization, including respect for the boundaries of your own role, and respecting the roles of your colleagues. Thus it was no surprise that I took great issue with what started happening, when people would go to the new IT guy for desktop support issues, and then rather than referring those inquiries over to me, since desktop support was part of my job and not his, he would provide the desktop support himself.
As I saw it, you can’t control where people go for their desktop support issues. If they go to the IT guy first, then so be it. As long as he refers the inquiries to the correct person, then all is well, since professional roles are respected. That he took on those inquiries and completed them on his own without telling anyone was highly disrespectful to me, because he was de facto stealing parts of my job. I mentioned this to Lane on multiple occasions, but he seemed unwilling to directly confront this poaching of my role, only sending out another all-staff email reminding people to contact me for desktop support. However, as long as the other guy was still completing desktop support requests for people, those reminders were a waste of effort. As was usually the case for Lane Brooks’ lazy management style, he didn’t like to actually confront problems, so he never told the guy to stop doing that, even when I said something, exacerbating the problem. Thanks for having my back.
That lack of boundaries also extended to my physical workspace. On more than one occasion, I came into work to find that the IT guy had been tinkering on my computer to test out some new server feature that he was trying to implement, likely because my machine was right in the room with him. I appreciated the need to test certain functions on a workstation that wasn’t his own, but I didn’t appreciate his using my computer to test these functionalities, especially without asking me first, and with no idea about what he changed. It felt violative of my own space, especially since I would have never used a production machine to test different functionalities. That is what we have test machines and dummy users for, after all, to verify that something works before deploying to actual users. And if you do need to test functionalities with real users, ask them first. Don’t disrupt my computer for testing purposes without asking, because that affects my work when his changes inevitably turned up a glitch. I had a full workload as it was, and didn’t have time to wait for him to fix a problem of his own making that he installed on my machine while I was away.
Fortunately, our shared office situation only lasted three months, as Lane decided to move him to another office in order to be able to collaborate more closely with the web team. I got my private office back, which lowered my stress levels considerably. I also made sure that I wouldn’t get another roommate by rearranging the space, going through the proper channels to purchase two big steel cabinets in order to store inventory items (think t-shirts and water bottles) that we needed frequent quick access to. I was the control point for these things anyway, so having it right at my fingertips made sense. Yeah, I could have put it in a storeroom, but I knew that I had to fill that extra space with something functional if I didn’t want another roommate. Cabinets don’t make noise and make phone calls, after all. So, mission accomplished there.
The only downside to that, though, was that I had less access to him. While I didn’t mind not having him in there with me, it also meant that when he would poach my work, I had no way of knowing about it. So I would see fewer requests for desktop support, because they were going directly to him and not to me, but I also had no way to prove that he was poaching my work, since I wasn’t there to see it. Besides poaching my desktop support work, there was one occasion where I scheduled our phone vendor to come to the office to do a few new cable drops, as this was considered a building issue, and therefore in my sphere, and I planned my day around being available for this vendor. I was then quite surprised when they never showed up. I found out later that day from the IT guy that they went straight to him (he also worked with the phone vendor about things in his own sphere), despite that my name was on the request, and then rather than referring them over to me, he was like, “I don’t know why you came here” and ultimately sent them away, without even thinking that someone else might have called them. Thank you for wasting my time and wasting our donors’ money on a housecall that was ultimately unfulfilled, and thank you for once again stealing my job from me.
There were also some responsibilities that we kind of shared. In the operations department, we were typically cross-trained in certain functions so that if one person was out, someone else in the department could step up, because goodness knows that Lane never wanted to step up to do any of it in a pinch. That made sense for continuity of operations, though it also meant that we couldn’t all take off at the same time. For instance, if the receptionist and I wanted to take the same day off, that would always be denied, because each of us backed up the other, i.e. they did parts of my job when I wasn’t around, and I did parts of theirs when they weren’t around. Same went for me and the IT guy, in that I would do my best to handle any issues when he was away, and the only time that he properly had responsibility for desktop support was when I was away. The only problem is that my experience dealing with servers was almost nonexistent. I could work with servers on the front end through an interface such as Plesk, but anything beyond that was above my capability. However, the IT guy managed to convince Lane to have me be a backup server guy, which I lacked the knowledge and skills to do effectively.
To that end, though, Lane sent me to a four-day Apple server class. It took us a very long time to get that done, but not for lack of trying. We had classes in multiple locations be booked and then get cancelled. I had originally booked the class in Charlottesville in May, with the idea that I would stay with my parents for the duration of the four-day course. That class got cancelled. So we rebooked it somewhere else, and that also got cancelled. Repeat a few more times of booking and cancelling, mostly due to low signup numbers, and I ultimately ended up taking the class in late September in Blue Bell, Pennsylvania, which is near Philadelphia. That class was only of limited utility, though, because while it taught how to administer the server through the Mac OS GUI, our server had been customized enough by the IT guy (without any documentation, I might add) that much of the class content no longer applied to my instance. So I got a basic understanding of how a standard Mac server worked, but unfortunately, didn’t have that anymore.
So unfortunately, I didn’t get much out of that training, which unfortunately was typical of most external trainings that Lane sent me to on his own. I still remember a weeklong training that I was sent to along with two other people in July 2008 where we got training on the Plone content management system. By the middle of the second day, they were far over all of our heads with that one, delving deeply into the server side of things, which none of us in attendance would ever have to deal with, and so we were just kind of sitting there, like, ummmmmmmmm for the rest of the week. I remember that by the third day, I had more or less mentally checked out of it, and was working on other things on my laptop between breaks (I used my personal laptop for that training rather than a work one, because if I had to go to this stupid training, I might as well have a Windows environment and access to my own stuff). About the only thing that we collectively got out of that training was a realization that Plone as a platform was highly complicated for no compelling reason, and that the best thing for us to do was to move off of it, which we ultimately did. Then there was that time management seminar that Lane sent me to in November 2008 (if this sounds familiar, I’ve spoken about this before), where I had no idea why I was even there to begin with, and unsurprisingly, I got nothing out of it and lost two full days of productivity. I bet that I could have made more effective use of my time working than wasting two days in a seminar where I had no idea why I was there. Either way, that’s some A+ management right there.
More concerningly, though, Lane also assumed that just by virtue of sending me to an external training, I would automatically become an expert in that thing. For the time management seminar, he expected instant results, when he never discussed anything with me ahead of it so that I knew what I needed to get out of it. For the Mac server training, he expected me to all of a sudden be an expert on Mac servers and be able to jump right in and do anything with a server. I don’t know of any training that instantly turns a person into an expert. Trainings, especially outside trainings, are often a starting point, in order to lay the foundation and expose a person to the concepts, but no one is an expert right after their initial training. It all usually comes together weeks or months later after you start using what you were trained on in the real world. As an example, earlier this year, all of the train operators at my current job were sent to a two-day training to learn about automatic train operations, where the train largely operates itself while we’re monitoring the systems. The training involved one day in the classroom and one day on the train simulator, which mimics a train cab well enough. We did several hours on the simulator to be certified for the new mode of operation, and while that training laid a decent foundation for our understanding automatic operation, a simulator, where the unit stays still and the motion happens on screens, is no substitute for the genuine article. Sure, I could do automatic operations on the simulator all day. But that first day operating in automatic mode on the real trains was something completely different, feeling the motions of the train as it went down the line and also getting body-slammed against the wall of the cab a few times when it started up before I had sat down (the laws of physics are a cruel master). I was mentally prepared, but all the same, I was nervous, and my reaction to my first automatic station stop was immortalized on the radio as I was asking a question about stopping. My exact words were, “Jesus Christ, this thing is going fast.” And despite hours of simulator training, i.e. I should be familiar with it all, that was perhaps the most exciting train ride that I’d ever had, as the train was propelling itself down the track on its own, and I wasn’t entirely comfortable with it yet as the operator. Mind you, I had ridden trains in automated operation plenty of times before, but never when I was the one in charge of it. I felt a noticeable sense of relief when I got to the end of the line and stepped off of the train after that first trip. But by the end of that first day, I had become more comfortable with it, though I was still quite happy to take the master controller out of park at the end of the day and operate the train manually for the deadhead back to the yard. But my point with all of this is that the training did not make any of us experts on automatic operation. That came later, after we had gotten some time with it under our belts. Same thing went for the server training. It was good to learn about how Apple expected you to administer a server, but then I came back to the office with the knowledge that we were doing it quite differently, and that the organization had more or less blown a whole lot of our donors’ money to send me to a training that would have been more useful while the server was still in the factory state, rather than after it had been heavily modified, i.e. so that I could have grown with the changes rather than be foisted upon them (I had recused myself from anything to do with servers until I had the training).
The expectation of expertise after a four-day training came to a head about a week or so later. There was some server problem in the evening not long after the office had closed for the evening, and I ended up having to call Apple tech support for it. Even with those four days of server training, I was very much over my head at that moment. However, the Apple guy was good with walking me through exactly what I needed to put into the command line in order to get things moving again. I entered the commands as instructed, and the problem was fixed. I had used the Unix command line a few times in the past, but was by no means an expert with it, or even particularly comfortable with it. I know my way around the MS-DOS command line, but the Unix command line is a whole different beast that I don’t know much about, largely because I’ve never had much of a need to use it, and thus no opportunity to actually become proficient with it and learn how to speak to it. Command lines are beautiful things, but they have a language all of their own, and I hadn’t spent enough time with the Unix command line to get any sort of proficiency with it. I mentioned to Lane that the issue was fixed, but when he asked me what the problem turned out to be and what I did to fix it, I said that I put in the commands that the tech support guy told me to put in after I told him what it was doing, and that solved the problem. He didn’t like that answer, because I didn’t understand what I was doing to make it work (because the training didn’t cover that), but at least I was honest about it that I was just taking directions over the phone from the expert and doing as I was told. However, even if I told him exactly what the problem was, it’s not like he would have understood it anyway. I probably could have told him anything and he would have eaten it right up.
Meanwhile, on the subject of server work’s being over my head, I remember that the IT guy wanted us to alternate weeks for being on-call for server emergencies, and Lane went along with it. That absolutely terrified me, because I had no idea what I was doing, and so if I got a call about something, wouldn’t have known how to handle it, so I would have had to call the IT guy anyway. I also didn’t get paid enough for on-call responsibilities, as I made about $39K a year at that time (about $58K in today’s money), which wasn’t a whole lot for the DC region, and I was barely making ends meet. I was desktop support, not servers, after all, and I also had other, non-IT responsibilities, and all of this IT work was taking up too much of my time, causing my non-IT responsibilities to suffer.
Though I suspect that this move was part of a broader effort on the IT guy’s part to paint me as incompetent and ultimately dispense with me. He also managed to run off the IT contractor, who still provided some services to us, and with him gone, he then absorbed those functions into his own role. In trying to get rid of me, he was super whiny about everything to do with me, to the point where I couldn’t help but think, how did you manage to get this far in life being such a whinybutt? He would whine and complain about everything, and would go crying to Lane about everything that he thought that I did wrong, even when I was right. And Lane, not knowing any better, would listen to him, and then I would have to hear from him about it and explain why I wasn’t wrong. I didn’t appreciate that, because over time, that painted an undeserved bad picture of me, because just like in school, the teacher is most likely to believe the first kid, even if the first kid is wrong. I also resented that whole treatment, because I didn’t operate like that. Unlike him, I wasn’t a snitch, and preferred to work directly with my colleagues to get what I needed out of them, in that “Hey, I still need [whatever] from you. How soon will that be ready?” kind of way. It was rare that I got management involved in anything regarding a colleague, because my thought always was and still is that it behooved me not to make enemies at work, because at the end of the day, we still had to work together, and I didn’t want to work with a bunch of people who hated me. I wasn’t trying to be popular, but I wanted to maintain good relations with everyone. Having enemies was bad, because that made my job harder. It was rare that I couldn’t stand someone at work, but the IT guy found his way there.
The sense that I had gotten with him was that he was not content to be part of a team, and work within his slice of the operation. He wanted all of IT, and have full control of his own little empire. And he would lie, cheat, steal, and gaslight as much as he needed in order to get what he wanted. And unfortunately, since Lane knew almost nothing about technology short of how to use his own Mac computer, he was of no use, and would just assume that the IT guy was right, and let him have free rein to do whatever he wanted.
Lane was so enamored by the guy that he was even willing to overlook his absolutely atrocious writing skills. Reading any of his guides was downright painful because of poor word choice, incorrect spelling, and improper punctuation. This is something that I saw coming and had tried to prevent, especially because IT was not just writing code and fixing computers, but also systems and process documentation. And that required solid writing skills. The way that I tried to prevent that was through my role in editing and publishing job advertisements for open positions, both on the organization’s website as well as on various external sites. There, I would get the job postings from Lane, edit them for readability, clarity, and accuracy, and then post them up. In other words, I did my best to save my incompetent boss from himself. One thing that I questioned with the IT position was the lack of a request for a writing sample. I was told that no writing sample was intentional, because an IT guy wouldn’t need to do any writing. Oh, you sweet summer child. And what a surprise: we ended up with someone who couldn’t write worth a damn. I offered to proofread and edit any documentation that came out before it became official in order to keep us looking professional, but my request was denied. So not only did I lose respect for the IT guy because he was a whiny little bitch, but I also found it hard to take him seriously because of his lack of writing skills, because poor writing skills make you look stupid. And from what I had heard from other colleagues, a lot of people found it hard to take him seriously because of his hideous writing skills, and also made fun of him behind his back for it. It was telling that for all future IT roles, if I didn’t see a request for a writing sample in the job posting, I would pose the question as, “You do want a writing sample for this, don’t you?” and Lane would agree with me. Tell me that I’m right without directly telling me that I’m right. Hey, I’ll take it. (If this part sounds familiar, I have written about this before.)
After we had worked together for nine months and clashed frequently, the process came to its logical conclusion: Lane pulled me into his office and told me that the department was being reorganized. They would hire a full-time tech support person, and I would lose all of my tech responsibilities to the IT guy, leaving me with only my non-IT responsibilities. He had run off the contractor, and now he got rid of me. He had gotten exactly what he wanted, and now he had it all. I was not happy about it, especially since Lane, in typical form, framed it as my failure rather than as a correction to an untenable situation that he had created, because why take responsibility for your own failings when you can blame someone else, right? That left a lot of hard feelings all around, as the IT guy had built himself up and became Lane’s golden child by tearing me down. My own working relationship with Lane had been damaged because of it, in part because Lane had clearly taken sides and that this had started the change in how I was perceived in the organization from “He knows everything,” to, “What does he know?” and because his own incompetence is what had created this situation in the first place. Additionally, the IT guy would be the new tech support guy’s boss, i.e. he not only got rid of me, but he also got promoted into management, as he now was responsible for a team of his own. He would get a title change from “IT Manager” to “IT Director” later on, and ultimately ended up managing a team of four, with a desktop support guy, a server guy, a web guy, and also an intern. I couldn’t make myself feel happy for his success, because he got where he was at my expense, and that is never okay.
After our roles were fully separated, as they should have been all along, I did take great joy in putting the IT guy in his place whenever he stepped over the line into my territory, such as with facilities matters, where I was fully in charge. I used to say, “That may be your equipment, but it’s in my building, though I only pulled that rank when it was absolutely necessary. I remember one time, we had a new server room constructed out of space that had previously gone unused. He then got approval from Lane to buy a portable air conditioning unit for this new server room as a way to save a few bucks over installing a proper cooling system. We bought it, and I delivered the unit to his office when it arrived. Fast forward a couple hours, and I caught him standing on a chair with the ceiling tiles taken out and using packing tape to put the exhaust hose for this portable A/C unit up in the plenum space above the ceiling. Nope, nope, nope, nope, nope. Get down from there right now, and I’m getting the building management up here to look at this in that I-need-you-to-send-an-engineer-up-here-before-my-IT-guy-destroys-the-place kind of way. They told us that the portable A/C unit was not the right solution by any means (their exact words were “totally inappropriate”), and not to use it at all. We ultimately ended up having a proper cooling system put in, which I could have told them that they needed to do in the first place. That cost a pretty penny due to the need to run lines from the server room up to a unit on the roof, but that was a sustainable solution. But I loved it when the building management told him no, because I knew. That incident led to an all-staff email from me, where I set out some very clear guidelines: the only people who should ever open up the ceiling are contractors that we have hired, the building management, or myself. No Food & Water Watch employee other than me was allowed to open the ceiling under any circumstances. The idea was that no one else had any business opening up the ceiling based on their job descriptions, and for me, where it actually was part of my job, I knew well enough to stay out of there. I’m sure that he knew that I was speaking more or less directly to him, but the way that I phrased it, he couldn’t say a thing about it. Meanwhile, I hope that he was satisfied with how much of our donors’ money he had wasted on this portable air conditioning unit that we weren’t allowed to use. We couldn’t return it, either, so we ended up selling it on eBay for a fraction of what we originally paid for it. I don’t know if Lane had words with him about that, but I certainly laughed about his mistake in that I-told-you-so kind of way.
Various colleagues often wondered why I disliked the guy so much, but they weren’t seeing the whole picture and didn’t understand exactly how much of a snake he really was. After all, he got where he was by attempting to destroy me, so I, rightly, felt like he climbed the ladder at my expense. Every time he was given more responsibility, I felt it personally. I was overjoyed when he announced that he was leaving the organization in the late summer of 2012, going on to some other nonprofit to do similar work. I was like, congratulations, good luck, and don’t let the door hit you on the way out. And fortunately, the guy who replaced him was an absolute team player. He was jovial, calm, and respected everyone. Great guy. Though the (unfair) damage to my professional reputation by the previous guy had already been done, and despite good relations with the new IT guy, I never really recovered from the damage that the first guy caused until I, myself, left the organization the following year.
Looking back at things more than a decade and a half later, I thought about what I could have done differently in order to get a better result. Holding the specific person that they hired constant, I cannot think of any path or action that I could have taken that would have produced a different result when the other guy was intent on securing the entire IT space for himself, and was willing to do dishonest things to get there. The only thing that I could possibly have done differently would have been to voluntarily relinquish my IT responsibilities, and get out of that situation earlier. I never imagined that my IT responsibilities would be taken away from me like that, though, and the way that things developed, I felt more like I had to defend myself against an encroachment on my own role more often than not. At the end of the day, I suppose that it’s best compared to what President Andrew Jackson was reported to have once said: “My only regrets are that I never shot Henry Clay or hanged John C. Calhoun.” In other words, I would have dispensed with this guy by removing myself from that situation. Of course, if it were up to me, knowing what I would ultimately come to know about him, I would have never hired him in the first place, though as a toxic individual, he fit in quite well in a toxic working environment.
I also wonder how this whole thing might have gone down had Food & Water Watch been a union environment back then like they are now. As a non-management role, I imagine that the scope of the IT Manager position would have been extensively negotiated and carefully defined, and there would be no role creep at others’ expense, as the union would have been obligated to help protect my role from any encroachment, and because the roles would be defined, I also wouldn’t be pushed into any job functions that were outside of the scope of my role, and especially not ones that were well outside of my skillset. One thing that I like about the environment that I’m in now, i.e. my good union job, is that no one is trying to steal responsibilities from other roles. If it’s not within the defined scope of your job, then it’s someone else’s job, and you leave it alone. None of this “going above and beyond” crap for no extra pay, and no stepping on toes. You come in, you do your job and only your job, and then you go home. It’s nice.
Meanwhile, the last time I saw the IT guy was about ten years ago. I was working a route on 16th Street NW during rush hour, and he was standing at a bus stop somewhere along the route looking all confused. I made the stop, and he asked me if I went to Silver Spring. I told him that no, I didn’t go to Silver Spring, as my route only went as far as Colorado Avenue. He didn’t recognize me driving the bus, but I brought it to his attention who he was talking to. Since then, I haven’t seen hide nor hair of him, and hasn’t it been pleasant. Like a number of other former Food & Water Watch colleagues, if I never see him again, it will be too soon.