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             Some more thoughts on Internal Corporate Malfeasense

The whole thing with Negiyo and Cowbell [1] is just an example of a much
wider phenomenon (do doo bee doo doo [2]) whereby some high-up muckity muck
(or even some mid-level muckity muck) makes a sweeping change that costs the
company (or heck, government agency or even a non-profit organization) gobs
of money, time and energy with no repercussions happening to the person
making the change.

Now, I'm not saying a person should be fired for making a mistake, because
Lord knows I've made plenty of mistakes, some of them real doozies that cost
the company I was working for lots of money. We (hopefully) learn from our
mistakes and for a while today I was real conflicted on this because I wanted
to take the person reponsible for Cowbell out back and apply a hefty clue-by-
four upside their head.

And it might have been a mistake on their part.

But I was able to identify the dichotomy I had—on the one hand, I felt that
releasing the [DELETED-lawyers-DELETED] [DELETED-hounds-DELETED] lawyers on
this person was fully justified for loosing thousands, if not millions, of
dollars, yet on the other hand, it might have been an honest mistake on their
part—TTTS (The Trouble Ticket System) was slowly dying and by going to an
outside source for the trouble ticket system, the company might have lowered
their operating costs and gotten better performance which turned out not to
be the case (and like I said, I've made mistakes, like using Java for Project
Brainstorm [3]). The resolution I found is in living with the mistake!

Had the person (or people) responsible for choosing Cowbell (switching back
to Negiyo here) had to use Cowbell on a daily basis and been forced to admit
“Yup, this was a mistake. A million dollar mistake, but a mistake
nonetheless,” I don't think I would have nearly the hatred for the person (or
people) as I do, since (from what I hear) it's plainly clear that the person
(or people) responsible for the decision aren't obligated to live with the
results (and in my case, the Java version of Brainstorm didn't pan out, so I
had to go on and implement it [4] two more times [5]).

[1] gopher://gopher.conman.org/0Phlog:2006/03/23.1
[2] http://www.devilducky.com/media/7452/
[3] http://www.conman.org/people/spc/refs/search/search.hp1.html
[4] http://www.conman.org/people/spc/refs/search/search.hp2.html
[5] http://www.conman.org/people/spc/refs/search/search.hp3.html

Email author at [email protected]

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