Saturday, August 22, 2009

Blame it on Todd Stevens

"Who's Todd Stevens?" asked the head of documentation where I work. He was looking at an indecipherable signature on a form that he was trying to process.

After telling him who really signed the form, my coworker and I got to thinking how great it would be to have an imaginary coworker named Todd Stevens. Any time anything went wrong, we could blame it on Todd Stevens. This would probably happen at least three times each day. We would page him every few days to get people thinking that he's real. And being a back up IT person, I could create an e-mail account for him and add him to the address list. (I bet he'll start getting spam within a day of my creating the account, too.)

I imagine eventually the company president would get pissed off enough to want to talk to this Todd Stevens, at which point we would declare that he moved to New Zealand to herd sheep. Well, maybe we'll just say he moved away.

Then we'll just start blaming everything on Ted Atkins. And he'll be a consultant.

6 comments:

Grumpy, M.D. said...

I think there was a movie about creating a non-existent employee.

The Secret of My Success?

Rummuser said...

Brilliant. I wish that I had you around to consult when I was in employment!

Square Peg Guy said...

Hi Dr. Grumpy:

After I posted it, I felt sure I heard of the idea before. I'm not much of a movie goer, so it was probably the theme of a series of Dilbert strips.

Thanks for commenting!

Square Peg Guy said...

Grand Sir:

You flatter me too much!

Thanks for commenting!

ericdbolton said...

While it might have some similarities to SOMS, I find this idea pretty dang cool.. Aside from making an email account, you would need to send out memos with his name on it...

Square Peg Guy said...

Hey Eric, memos will be good. And maybe we'll sign some commented code with his name!