3484 Spoilsport

Sunday, March 11, 2012

It's not enough to come up with a good idea; you have to come up with
the good idea at the right time. Many people with a good idea present it too soon,
before anyone is ready to accept it, and then drop the idea when they meet resistance.
When the world is ready, someone else puts forth the same idea
and gets all the credit.
-- Silk --

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I was the spoilsport at work.

There was a couple, co-workers, who were dating. This was before cell phones, before home computers. We had an intra-company internet, but there was no connection to "*the* internet". We had terminals connected to a mainframe, and company mainframes all over the world were connected to each other, and each person was assigned personal space on huge disk drives in the computer center (a.k.a. virtual disks).

Anyway, these two who were dating had been sending emails to each other, specifying in graphic x-rated detail what they were going to do to each other that evening. They were storing the emails on their virtual disk space on the system disks. I guess neither of them were smart enough to remember that they worked in a community of 250 system programmers, who had written the system they were using.

Someone changed the permissions for their virtual space. Anybody could read their emails. The "how to" was passed from person to person throughout the product area. The contents of the emails was the #1 whispered topic in the cafeteria and behind office doors.

When it finally got around to me, I was horrified. I think that was an absolutely rotten thing to do.

The day I found out, I saw the female of the pair walking past my office, so I called her in and told her something has been going on that she should know about, that it had been going on for some time throughout the product area, and no, I didn't know who started it. Then I linked to her virtual disk and his, and opened hers. I didn't say anything else, just walked out of the office and left her to it.

It was a spur-of-the-moment thing. Maybe if I had thought about it longer I'd have been less direct, like hinted to one or both of them that it was easy to grant access to other people's disks, easy to read others' email. But I'm not sure they'd have picked up on the implications.

She was very ashamed. They were married less than two months later. I guess that redeemed her.

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Another incident cost me a friend.

Mark (not his real name) was one of about seven of us who were hired together (for me it was a re-hire) and we hung out together, bar after work once a week, hikes on the weekends, and so on. They were mostly just out of college, so I was 16 or 17 years older than they, but I still fit in. I was a bit more emotionally intimate with most of them because sometimes they saw me as a mother-figure, and came to me for advice. Mark, Linda, and I were especially close.

Linda (not her real name, either) had a crush on Mark, but none of her flirtation was returned.

Mark shared a house with two other guys. Eventually, one of the housemates, Dan, was transferred to a distant plant.

Mark and Dan kept in touch by email.

Thereafter, every time you saw Mark, he had another Dan story to share. Dan said this, Dan thinks that. He thought everything Dan said or did was enormously funny and interesting. He tacked photos of Dan to the bulletin board over his desk, cut out snippets of Dan's emails and tacked them up, decorated it all with ticket stubs and ski lift tickets.

When you went to his office, he'd direct your attention to the latest addition, and tell you the story that went with it.

People started to snicker.

I walked into his office one day, was immediately directed to the latest Dan photo, and suddenly impulsively had enough. That was 25 years or so ago, but I still remember exactly what I said.

"Mark, you have to stop doing this. This (waving at the bulletin board) looks like a shrine to Dan. It looks like something a twelve-year-old girl would do when she has a crush on a rock star. You've got to stop talking about him. People are starting to wonder exactly what the relationship is. I personally don't care, but it's hurting you out there (waving to the hall)."

His face turned dark, he ushered me out of his office, and he never spoke a single word to me ever again!

When he saw me in the hall, he turned his face away from me. He stopped coming to the group social activities if I was there. We worked together, but all communication was through an intermediary. When I transferred to the litigation lab, he was manager of a product area I was heavily involved in, but he never came to a single meeting. He always sent a member of his department to represent him. In later years I'd occasionally see him in the halls when I visited his area for meetings, and I'd always say "Hi, Mark", and he'd always look straight through me, as if I wasn't there.

He was still friendly with the other members of our group, although a bit cool, so I always knew what was going on with him. Once he took the shrine down and stopped talking about Dan, there were no more rumors, no more giggling. As far as any of us know, he never dated anyone local, male or female. I heard Dan had married and had some kids.

I suspect Mark and Dan's relationship was just friendship on Dan's side, and something more intense on Mark's side.

I haven't seen him or heard anything about him since they closed the plant twelve years ago and all our coworkers scattered to the four winds. I often wonder if Mark ever came out of the closet, even to himself.

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Oh, that last sentence reminds me. Mark bought a house, and like all new homeowners he was excited and gushed about it at lunch. (A lunch spent ignoring me.) Someone asked him, "How many closets does it have?" and he counted up, asked if a pantry counted, answered seriously, and everyone at the table cracked up. I believe he honestly didn't know why they were laughing.
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