Well it is 5 years ago that I was let go from Dull after being blamed for leaking a Pentium chip bug in one of Dull's systems to JC's PC News and Links. I was marched out of building 2 after a quick meeting with HR where the supposed guy with evidence from the IT investigative team was a no show.
A week later I went back in for an exit interview with the IT guy for what I can only call one of the most idiotic line of questioning I had ever heard. I had wanted to video tape and record the meeting, but Dull wouldn't allow it. Ironically it was held on Braker in North Austin where the bug had actually been leaked from, and not from Round Rock where I worked.
I was questioned in some sort of manner that might have cracked some by an apparent Dull legal or perhaps Intel legal rep. The lady might have outsourced to a better team as I had a Government degree and wasn't going to fold under a lawyers weak attack.
Didn't AMDZone represent a conflict on interest with my job at Dull? Uhh, isn't AMD a company Dull himself is in contact with, and don't they provide Dull with test systems, and wouldn't they be a supplier potentially I quipped? And after all wasn't AMDZone on my resume, and didn't I make a point of it being a source of computer knowledge for me at my job interviews?
Well doesn't running that site mean you want Dull to use AMD CPUs? Well that would be up to Dull, now wouldn't it? I don't think a guy just a few months on the job in internal IT support was going to cause that to happen.
But we found you had uploaded text files over ftp, and we think you found info on the bug in an Excel file you were helping someone with. No, these were updates to AMDZone uploaded in the dos prompt using textpad and the ftp command. Go and check them IT guy for leaks. Idiots, the leaker is right across the street! Do you know who is it? Certainly not, and I still do not 5 years later. It was clear the crack lawyer had a very poor concept of the internet as did the rest of the team, although not as poor as their current grasp of the gaming PC market.
Well the aftermath many had thought I should sue. Well being a white male I had no way to do so in Texas as I was advised by lawyers. You see the key to Dull is to avoid lawsuits, and that means white males are the easiest to drop to the side, as I witnessed while working there. Simply because the risk of a lawsuit was much less than say unemploying a hispanic female. Lawyers have made our lives all so much more fun.
So there I sat, having sold my Dull stock and purchased a condo closer to it to avoid an extra hour morning drive the month before with no job, a mortgage for the first time fresh out of college and days from Christmas. Luckily while head boss of many Office Space like bosses had told me to hold onto the stock, because it would vault past $50 again and split, and increase I knew better.
From inside internal support helping everyone from the manufacturing floor, to HR, to sales, to account executives, and seeing the legions of new hires each day in the cafeteria being briefed each day, and seeing the general lack of IT talent around me, I had a unique vantage point to see that this bubble was bursting. The precious Dull stock that all where so paranoid to keep close like the one ring itself has faltered this past 5 years, while the value of my condo has doubled. Mark Twain was right when he said, "Buy land, they're not making it anymore."
I must ponder how things would have turned out had the bug never had been leaked. Had I been let be to enjoy the 30% raise I had gotten that very day. Had I been stuck at Dull on New Years Eve as they implemented their ridiculous year 2000 bug plan.
One thing is certain. Dull has remained the same. I gave them one last chance to be part of the Texas Gaming Festival this past February. They wanted to ride the coat tails of ATI, and provide no sponsorship money, but they would provide the networking equipment we needed. Well that changed to half of the equipment we needed, and when AMD came on board they became quite nervous. They didn't want the AMD systems, 50 in all, to overshadow the performance of their woefully underpowered P4 gaming boxes, a mere 20 they would bring.
They wanted AMD out, but why turn down cash sponsorship, the fastest gaming CPU on the planet, and 150% more tourney machines? Well they flopped, and floundered, and lied, and pulled out two weeks in advance so that I could spend almost $10,000 on table top switches out of my pocket. Luckily 3com came through with Layer 3 switches for our backbone.
The moral of the story? Don't trust Dull, particularly when it comes to real estate. And support your white box builder that does give a damn about its customers, and its employees. Surely that is ultimately more profitable for all?
