3392 Awards I never got

Thursday, November 10, 2011

“I refuse to believe that corporations are people until Texas executes one.”
-- DemocraticUnderground's Earth First --

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On a recent episode of "The Good Wife", the law firm received government documents with most of every page redacted --- just about everything crossed out with black magic marker. It reminded me of an incident when I was working in the litigation lab.

The Company was in litigation with a competitor, and the competitor was required to turn over documents to us, and vice versa, and in every document sent or received, much of every page had been crossed out.

We used "foils" in meetings. Y'all might remember them. You'd run a page through a machine with a heat-sensitive transparent plasticy sheet, and the machine "burned" the dark parts of the page into the foil, and then you could project the foil onto a screen.

It was the usual practice in our office to make a copy of the page from a stapled or bound document, and then burn the foil from that, and then the foil looked just like the original, redactions in place and all.

One day I had an unbound document, so I burned a foil from the original page. Surprise! Magic marker doesn't reflect enough heat to burn into the foil, but doesn't prevent what's under the marker from reflecting heat! The black marks were gone, and the redacted areas were as clear and readable as the day they were printed!

I went to my manager's office, closed the door, and silently handed her the original page with the black redactions and the clean foil. After she picked herself up off the floor, she called the headquarters attorneys. After they picked themselves off the floor, they told us that this phone call didn't happen. However, Company documents sent to the competitor from that day on contained copies of pages with redactions. And of course everyone in our office was shown this "secret" "neat trick".

The competitor never caught on.

This should have earned me a huge outstanding contribution award, but since no one could admit it happened, I got no acknowledgement. It didn't even go into my record.

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There was another similar incident.

We had a lot of data on the big disks (the ones about the size of a dishwasher) on dedicated mainframes under triple lock with video cameras and motion detectors and no remote access. Much of it was competitor's code. When a particular set of code was no longer in dispute, we were required to delete it from the disks. That had been going on for a few years, until eventually that particular dispute had been settled, and then auditors from the competitor were going to come to examine the disks and insure all of their material was gone.

In a department meeting a few weeks before the audit, we were reminded to delete materials. I had none of the subject materials under my control, so I hadn't been deleting stuff, so I innocently asked what the procedure was. It turns out they were simply issuing a "DELETE" command on those files.

I walked into my manager's office, closed the door, and explained to her what was wrong with that. When you delete a file, the data is not erased! Non-programmers, or programmers who don't know how the operating system works, were at that time unaware that when you delete a file, all it does is remove the pointer to it in the directory, and mark that section of the disk as "free". If you don't write over the file, the contents are still there. (Now, of course, everyone knows that because it's key to TV detective dramas, but back then it wasn't widely known.)

So those disks contained years of data that we had reported as deleted and that we were now illegally in possession of, and that the auditors would be sure to find.

After she picked herself up off the floor, she called the headquarters attorneys. After they picked themselves off the floor, they told us that this phone call didn't happen. However, we were to say nothing to anyone, just clean those disks immediately!

So for the next ten days I worked enormous amounts of overtime, alone, printing off directories, identifying all the free disk/cylinder/head/file etc. areas, and overwriting them all with blanks. All my other work was put on hold, and I got into a lot of trouble with a lot of people in product areas and at corporate for holding up deadlines, but no one could be told why.

I should, again, have got an enormous outstanding contribution award for pulling the corporate ass out of the fire, but since no one dared to mention the situation, instead my reputation took a hit. In fact, folks at corporate held up my next promotion because I was "unreliable".

Is it any wonder I retired as soon as a decent package was offered?

For the first ten years of my retirement I was barred from mentioning any of this, on pain of losing my retirement benefits. It is now twenty years later, and I doubt anyone cares any more. Statute of limitations and all that.
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