Avoidance of Blame #3

I ducked some responsibility today. Ironically it's for something good.

I went to the publicly-available website for my company and logged in using the internal password.

At the top of the page that resulted was this string of text (I paraphrase):

Hey diddle-diddle
The cat and the fiddle
This is some text to see what happened here.
Here's an embedded link
Here's a plain link:
www.toostupidtobepresident.com
Jenny and Lisa are lovers

Below that was the usual content, and above it was a graphic (trademarked graphic!) belonging to the Enormous News Corporation (ENC)--which has no place on our site.

There was more. The address of that page was (I paraphrase again) "www.jennyloveslisa.companyX.com" instead of the usual "companyX.default.asp" or whatever.

Jenny and Lisa are the product managers. This is becoming our flagship product. Naturally I raised the issue with Jenny. Jenny is an older woman, computer-savvy, but not what one could call a power user. She also occupies an odd niche position, her history with the company is such that many people still see her as the department manager she used to be before her "lateral promotion" into electronica. Technically she's higher up the totem pole than I am, though theoretically off to the side.

She conducted an investigation, and concluded that everything was fine. However, when I logged in again later, the same glitch was visible ...

What to do, what to do?

So I called a friend in the IT department and explained the problem.

"However," I explained, "I don't want it to seem as though I'm doing an end run around Jenny--she's just out of the office right now," (which was true--she'd gone for a meeting with the head of IT), "So I was just wondering if you could take a quick look at this and see if you see what I see, you see?"

"Sure."

"And I'd prefer it if you didn't, uh, well ... this is Jenny's baby and ..."

"No problem--I visited the page and spotted the problem, 'sall I need to say."

I love it when people really understand what I'm trying to tell 'em without saying. The faults can get corrected, it doesn't look like I had to duck 'round the communications chain around here.

Now if I only stopped blogging and got some work done I could be a star!


***

Interlude

I was sitting with the narcissistic gen-y yutz from marketing, discussing politics, when he said:

"In my opinion, only those who don't vote get to bitch, because it's not their fault who got elected."

I have taken no further action, but only for lack of a place to hide the body.