I worked as systems administrator for a complete and utter fool at a law firm. This guy called himself a “computer specialist” and even had brochures printed that touted his computer expertise. Yet he BARELY knew what a computer was. This wouldn’t have worked but for the fact that his cohorts, the other attorneys, were even dumber than he was. The best description of that syndrome I ever ran across was the saying “in the land of the blind the one-eyed man is king.”

So we got a computer network on the Doofus’ recommendation. This was about 1992 so it wasn’t anything as modern as the networks today. He said we needed to network because we needed to have email capabilities. Just inter-office email, internet email was too new and not even considered. So we networked. Then when it came down to the end, they found out that to buy the licenses and have network versions of the software, which was needed for us to be able to have email, would cost $1,200 more. So the Doofus made the decision that we would then NOT get the network version and he ordered me to borrow the stand-alone version of the software from the office of my friend who worked in a nearby office. I complied and eventually wrote a Word Perfect Macro that accessed a DOS command and ran a Novell Network broadcast message that you could customize. It was like an inter-office instant message. Forever after the Doofus called this “our email system.”

It gets worse. One day, he went to a bar association seminar on computer piracy and came back all pumped up on this new knowledge. He marched straight to my desk to announce to me that he had learned about computer piracy and “it is a bad thing”. He said “We have to make sure we never do that.” I was momentarily stunned and then said “But we do that all the time” and I explained the things we’d been doing that he personally had ordered me to do (buying one copy of software and installing it on all 35 computers, borrowing software from other law firms, etc.) I said “If we did any more of this, I’d have to have a patch on my eye and a parrot on my shoulder.” The sad thing is, I don’t know for sure that he really understood it.

Not long after that, our network crashed briefly and I had to reset it all and I had the receptionist page everyone that they needed to reboot their computers. Guess who called me to see what that meant? You guess it, the DOOFUS!!!