Save your own skin ...
About 10 years ago, I was working as a systems admin for a council in North Wales, there were 3 of us, myself, an older guy( lets call him "Bob"), who'd been doing hte job for donkeys years, and Sally, a bright girl, dedicated and hard working, but being a single mum, she oftne had trouble with child care arrangements.

Sally had only been there a year or so, I'd been there 6 months, and it was pretty obvious that Bob didn't really like her having to change her work hours around to look after her kid. she thoughtthe world of her kid and did everyting she could to make sure the kid was looked after and had a decent chance in life.

Jobs in North Wales (especially good jobs) are hard to come by, and sally was determined no to lose this one, it was probably the best job she'd ever had.

Everything was going fine, and to be fair, we had to do little if any out of hours work, but every now and then, it just had to be done. Sally could never find child care, so always tried to get out of it if possible.

So, at the end of every month, we always had to run a couple of jobs manually. The problem was a rather crap payroll system written in COPBOL, that had 99% of its stuff available as command line scripts .. however a few areas remained that simply neeeded a variety of clicking on screens and generally doing manually. Nothing too difficult, but since it was all connected to the end of month procedures, and the monthly payroll run, it was fairly importnant. It always got left to us, because the beancounter couldn't be bothered to come in and run it just after midnight on the last day of the month.

So, eventually, it came round to being Sally's turn .. Bob usually did it, I'd never done it, and well, Bob was determined to have the evening off. Sally tried to wiggle out of it, or even find a baby sitter, to no avail. Eventually, she tried her last hope. Would I do it? Bob of course was adamant. He didn't want ME to do it, he wanted SALLY to do it. Period.

So, she suggested a plan, I would do it, using her access card, her password and run the job, Bob would never know. I wasn't sure, you know, sharing your access card or telling anyone your password as a sys admin, well, its the Number One Rule, you just NEVER do it .. but, well, I sort of felt sorry for her.

So, the end of the month fell on a Saturday. I didn;t need to be there until 11pm on Friday night, so I spent a few hours in the pub, with a quiet pint. Well, it was a bit noisy actually, met a few mates, might have had more than one pint too. Actually, its just possible I was completely rat arsed by the time 11pm arrived. I staggered out and made my way over the road to the offices, let myself in, sat down and tried to accomplish the task. I knew exactly what to do, I logged in and err, well, I *thought* I knew exactly what to do anyway .. I honestly have no real clue what I did. Things went very badly wrong, infact, things went so badly worng, I gave up and went home.

To cut a long story short, no one got paid that month, or at least not until a week later and even then it was a temporary payment based on the previous month. Took the rest of the month to sort it out.

Sally of course was blamed. It was pretty tense between us, and I had a few angry phone calls from her at home, plus a few tearful ones .. but she was in deep trouble. She did eventually get in so much bother from it she told them it was me that had done it ... and sure enough I was called into the office.

There was Bob, there was Bob's boss, there was Sally. What to do?

"What an outrageous lie, I was in the pub with my mates!"

I know, I know ... but save your own skin is always the best advice.

Sally was sacked, and when I last heard from her a year later was still on the dole, she'd gone down hill a bit, got in with the wrong crowd and her kid got taken into care .. lifes tough huh?

I do still feel bad about it, but hell, it was a great job .. you don't want to lose a job like that! :)
(flipper is going to die in a bizarre gardenning accident, Mon 3 Sep 2007, 19:49, Reply)