Watch This Space: Today was an extraordinary day, and I have an unusual tale to tell. Unfortunately, I don’t have the energy to write about it tonight, so it’ll have to wait another day or two. Stay tuned.

Update (Saturday, October 26, 2002): Okay, so I’ve written my tale. Click, click. Read, read. It’s rather long, but it’s a Swift tale, to be sure.

Prologue:

A few weeks ago, we got a new Xserve file server to help us work more efficiently. Unfortunately, it’s been a little temperamental, leaving all of us in the art department befuddled and frustrated. We’d get knocked off the server for no reason, or the permissions would go haywire, disabling our ability to write to the server or to save the files we spent hours editing. In a nutshell, the buggy new baby made us nostalgic for our old and sluggish file server.

One day, I got yet another new-server-related message pop up on my screen. I thought it was going to be another one of those “unexpectedly signed off” types of messages, but no. It said: “This is the ghost in your machine.“

Hm. I suspected our Creative Director, who had Admin access to the server, but when I asked him what he did, he looked baffled. “What do you mean? What happened now?” I pointed the message out to him, and he frowned. “Let me see what I can do,” he said, and he went to his keyboard and typed away while I tapped the Enter key to remove the “ghost” message from my screen.

A moment later, I got another message: “BOO!“

Okay, then. I was really confused. Amused, but confused. I called to our CD again and told him what the message was this time, and he looked even more bewildered than I did. “I don’t understand what’s going on,” he said, and I lightheartedly suggested that the ghost, or whatever it was, was the cause of all our bugs.

He peered at his screen again, looking for all the world like he was trying to find the problem, and typed away while I removed the “Boo!” message.

Another message popped up in its place: “HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!“

So I burst out laughing and announced to the room in general that the ghost was now laughing at me, and I was just crazy insane with the curiousity, wondering what in the world was causing all this mischief on my machine. Meanwhile, our CD, behind me, was laughing as well. Only, he was laughing at me, delighting at his secret joke. It turned out that it was him on the Admin controls, messing with my mind by sending me messages on my screen.

Too bad we couldn’t blame all the bugs on his prank-playing, though; we were still having problems with the file server…

Chapter One

As if we didn’t have enough problems on our hands, our e-mail server and our web site were also starting to act a little funny. We were due to send out a mass e-mail to our customers, but we discovered that for some reason, no one outside our company could e-mail us or visit our e-commerce site. What was going on? Did it have anything to do with the attack on the internet over the weekend? We scratched our heads and tried to figure it out.

Our Creative Director and IT guy spent all afternoon on Wednesday trying to figure things out; they stayed late into the evening and came in unusually early the next day. Meanwhile, our Web Designer and our Web Programmer decided to take a little break and work on some other items on their to-do list, free from the panic and worry gripping everyone else on the web team.

When I came in Thursday morning, the situation hadn’t changed much. E-mail from outside still wasn’t getting to us, and the web site was still inaccessible to the public. I asked the Web Designer (wD) and the Web Programmer (wP) if the Creative Director (CD) and the IT guy were making any progress at all. The answer I got was negative… but wP had a grim little smile on his face as he told me that he and wD knew what the problem was anyway.

“What do you mean?” I asked them. “What’s wrong with it? I thought it was being handled.”

“Oh, we just tweaked it a little,” one said.

“But we’re not going to tell anyone about it,” the other added.

“Not until after they’ve sweated a little,” the first one explained.

“And not until they agree to pay us more,” the second one elaborated.

This brought me up short. “What?” I managed to say in my confusion. That’s when they decided to tell me in their own little way that they felt underappreciated and overworked. They had a letter already drafted, the two said, and they were going to hand it over as they revealed their sabotage. This, they said, would show the big wigs just how valuable and knowledgeable they truly were.

Inside, I was in a panic. They couldn’t be serious, could they? They looked halfway smug, and yet halfway grim. I’d had many a conversation with the two over the many moons I’ve worked with them, and what they were telling me seemed completely within the scope of possibility—surreal, but possible.

“You want to be in on it?” they asked me.

Good lord. I could see it now, their announcement being made, the tensions running high, anger, yelling, the pointing out of the sales lost due to the downtime, accusations, threats, and a whole lot of firing going on. You’re fired! You’re fired!

Did I want a third “You’re fired!” added to that? Hell, no. I was planning on moving soon, and I needed the money and the steady job.

“No thanks,” I told them, only to see growing frowns of doubt on their faces. Were they starting to mistrust me? Did they think I had no faith in them, no loyalty?

“Okay, but you’re missing out,” they said, slowly re-adopting optimistic smiles, but I shook my head.

“What if it backfires on you?” I asked, trying to make them see reason. Didn’t they see that what they were doing was essentially… terrorism? Nobody ever responds favorably to that, and I was sure they had yet to see it that way. Which is why I couldn’t bring myself to tattle on them either; I was sure their intentions were simply mislaid, their judgment handicapped by temporary insanity.

They assured me their plan wouldn’t backfire, and they tried again to get me to join them. I refused, and they shrugged; they would ask the photographer if he wanted to be in on it, and I told them good luck.

Then I sat down to my work and quailed, ready to see the fireworks fly.

Chapter Two

When our photographer finally came in, wD and wP waited for the right time to tell him. When CD left the room to talk with the IT guy, they began their story… then cut it short when CD walked back in quite suddenly.

CD naturally suspected something and assumed that wD and wP were talking about him behind his back. wD and wP stammered and did a piss poor job of keeping poker faces. CD frowned, waved the whole thing away, and didn’t even bother to worry about it; he had bigger fish to fry, what with the e-mail and web site misbehaving. Something about the DNS server, he muttered, and he left the room again.

…which left wD and wP free to talk openly with the photographer again.

I shook my head and left the room. I couldn’t take it. The whole art department was going to fall apart if they went ahead with this, and I didn’t want to be around to see it; I didn’t even want to be seen as being a part of it.

Later, wD and wP told me that the photographer was definitely in on it. He was adding his name to the letter they drafted, and all three of them would be demanding 10% more pay. Ack. I was already starting to worry for them, and I didn’t know if I could handle the stress.

During our walking break, they tried to convince me again to join them, while I tried to convince them not to proceed with their plan. “You just bought a house!” I told one. To the other, I said, “and you have a trip to London coming up!”

“It’s okay,” they assured me. They had a back-up plan if things went wrong. wD’s girlfriend’s grandfather was planning on investing a ton of money into a new company, and they were asked to head up the web division. I could come with them, they said. There was even a $50,000 stock option and a signing bonus.

It sounded nice, but even during the dot-com highs, it would have sounded too good to be true. I shook my head yet again and turned down their offer. All of my warnings seemed to fall on deaf ears, until I realized that they were merely practicing all the motivational attitudes we learned during our power lunch meetings.

Think positive! Envision your dream! Want it, and go for it! Just do it! If you don’t risk, you don’t gain.

…and here they were, risking everything. So I stopped trying to convince them not to do it.

“I won’t be joining you guys,” I told them, “but whatever you do, I’ll be rooting for you.”

Chapter Three

Minutes later, I was due to attend two meetings, the second of which wD and wP would be attending as well. They wondered if the best time to announce their sabotage was at that second meeting, and wP asked me to let them know if the mood from the first meeting was right for them.

“Sure,” I told them. Whatever.

So there I was in the first meeting, sharing my work progress and getting the information I needed, and at the same time, my mind kept chanting the phrase, “They’re insane to be doing this. They’re insane to be doing this.” The next thing I knew, the first meeting was over, the second meeting was starting, and wP was looking to me for some kind of sign.

I shrugged and shook my head. I don’t know.

So I waited.

And I waited.

And all things web were discussed. Mass e-mail. Web updates. Web statistics. Web sales. Web marketing. The DNS server problems that caused the downtime…

But no discussion of sabotage.

wD and wP were calmly listening and taking notes, and neither looked as though they had anything to say at all.

Curiouser and curiouser.

After the meeting, the three of us (wD, wP, and I) went to meet wD’s girlfriend for bowling during our lunch break, and that’s when they broke it to me.

It started with wP telling me some far-fetched story that seemed to have nothing to do with the subject matter at hand. I’d never heard it before, but the pattern seemed familiar, and somehow I knew the punchline would be that some stranger was prone at his feet, pulling on his leg, like he was pulling on mine. My mouth gaped in outrage when I realized it, and I stopped him before he got to the middle of the story.

“You were pulling my leg!” I half-yelled, which only made wD and wP laugh like loons.

There was no sabotage. They hadn’t really messed with the DNS server. They hadn’t really drafted an ultimatum letter. They hadn’t really recruited the photographer, who by the way wasn’t fooled by their tricks for even a second. And they hadn’t really planned on asking for more money or on leaving the company.

Idiot! I’m such a gullible little idiot!

So they replayed the events of that day, discussed the things they told me and what they were thinking as they told me these things. They couldn’t believe how easy a target I was. It started off rather harmlessly, with a casual remark, and when I swallowed that one, they fed me more.

Bah! What a day.

Epilogue

So there I was, licking my wounds, when the phone rang. It was the cat man calling, asking how my day went, and I told him.

“Ahh,” he said, “yet another adventure in Gullible’s Travels.”

“Oh, that’s not nice,” I protested.

He turned to the cat. “Ca-a-a-at, your mommy bought the Brooklyn Bridge again.”

I groaned.

Later, wD and wP retold the day’s tale to CD, and all CD could do was laugh, shake his head, and say, “Now you see? That shows you how much faith she has in you two, to believe a crazy story like that. April, I can’t believe you would have let them get away with it. Why didn’t you tell me?”

And irony is having the human encyclopedia tell me later that wD and wP were lucky that I didn’t tattle on them because it seemed to him like something I would do.

Not that it mattered… because none of it was true.

What a fool. What a poor little fool I am.

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