I have so many great anecdotes about this person, I thought I would get them all down for the record. Her name was Vicki
It was in the run up to our new ADSL internet connection that Vicki came to me with a query. She presented me with a 10 page long phone bill showing our dual ISDN line dialling out, every 5 minutes for 24 hours a day. I was to find the culprit, who upon discovery would be severely punished. The proxy server hooked up to the ISDN lines had been helpfully logging all the connections, so it was easy to trace the connections to..... her PC. She had installed bonzi-buddy and her machine was riddled with spyware. Severe punishment was not forthcoming on this occasion.
One day he had been on the phone with her insurance company regarding a small crash she had in her Merc recently. The insurers told her that she had not reported the incident soon enough and the cutoff was the previous day. Vicki insisted that she had sent them an email the day before, there must have been a technical holdup. She then burst out her office, charged in my direction and asked me how to send an email now but make it appear like it had been sent yesterday.
I told her changing the date on her PC would not be enough, we would have to change the date on the mail server in case they checked the headers. She ordered me to change the date on the mail server, I refused, saying it would cause havoc with the companies internal email. Instead I installed a free SMTP server on an old PC, and she sent the email with confidence that it would fool the insurance people. It didnt.
The preceding stories may make it sound like I was responsible for IT in this company, I wasn't. That honour went to a complete dimwit who had no skills for the job and whose only prior IT experience had been for a family firm. A drunken Vicki eventually confided at a Christmas party that he was only hired for his looks.
The dimwit was from out of town, as was another employee - and they hit on the idea of sharing a flat. Vicki vetoed this idea, as the other employee was technically the dimwits supervisor. A few months later she embarked on a secret affair with a married developer.
One day she was due to fly to ireland to meet with a client, the client was rather beligerent so she chickened out at the last minute, and had me call them and say she was stuck in traffic and would miss her flight. The client demanded her mobile phone number, I said I would get her to give them a call. She started dialling but I suggested to her to go out and find some traffic so the call would sound convincing - she complied.
All the staff had been gathered in the meeting room, and Vicki unvieled her masterplan to cope with spurious sickdays. Any employee not calling in sick for a 6 month period would get an extra day added to thier holiday allowance. Vicki frequently boasted that she was never ill. She did however take a dozen or so unnanounced "working from home" days every year, a perk denied to all other staff members.
I eventually left the company and found a much better employer. one day in the reception I bumped into an old colleague. It turns out that my old company were moving into the same building - well not my old company exactly. They had embarked on a large project personally managed by Vicki - which had gone awry and resulted in Vicki being shown the door. A few days later the VAT man showed up with a big pile of unpaid bills - forcing the company to close doors (an old owner then hired the bulk of the workforce to create a "new" business).
Vicki was responsible for paying the VAT, how the Inland Revenue showed up a few days after she left is anyones guess.