Dark Nebula Gets Too Much Sun

Now that I have stopped ROFL, and the guffaws and snickers of my co-workers are no longer able to be heard outside their cubicles, I can tell the tale of too much sun.

One of our Directors was charged with the responsibility to create the PR spin paragraphs that would be issued to all of us as the official words that we are allowed to say when queried about our Former Executive Director, who is charged with evading arrest and embezzlement, and after many long hours of working with legal counsel and the Directors upline management, the Director had the final document ready to issue, which was based on mark-ups and changes that had been emailed to him from the legal eagles and his management. OK, then, ready to go. Not.

We received the covering email that said the attached documents were ok to use as the basis for our spoken responses, and also that if pressed, we could just email the spun FAQs directly. Ooops. I was one of the first to open the email, and when I clicked on the attachment, I noticed that a comment balloon opened up with a name as the author of the comment that I had never heard of. The contents of the balloon were not visible to me yet, because I had not taken the time to roll over the comment with the mouse. I emailed the Director and asked "Who is ______"?, filling in the name that I saw. The Director wrote back that that person is a member of the senior management team that reviewed the document prior to issue. Ok then, no worries, thought I. I printed the attachment out so I could have it to review while driving home, and guess what happened?

ALL the edits and comments, complete with balloons and authorship, were showing and in plain sight to everyone who received the attachments, which was the entire organization, including remote offices, etc. Ooops. I casually walked over to the Director's office, knocked, and asked if I could show him what I had found, which he might want to know. He said sure, to come in, because he was relaxing just a bit because it was the end of the day, he had just gotten his last big task completed (sending out the PR spin email), and he was leaving for Hawaii for two weeks the next morning. Uh oh. Maybe my timing was not favorable. Too late, I was already in the office. I showed him the printed attachment pages, which showed all the comments, some of which were of the nature "...maybe we are telling too much here. Let's cut some of that out", which of course a reporter would love to dig deeper into. He took the pages, read them, paused, and then, without raising his head but definitely raising his voice to a level that everyone in the office heard, shouted

"GOD DAMN IT!"

Have a nice vacation *:-)