And the rumour mill goes insane…

This morning one of my cow orkers was escorted off the premises. There are now two guys sitting at his desk going through his computers looking for something. (I hope they know Linux, because that’s all that’s on one of the two computers.)

CC and I have argued in the past, including one time when he yelled in the middle of the office that I was being “a fucking crybaby”, merely because I asked if his wiping out of all the changes I’d done to “his” part of the program was deliberate or one of his frequent mistakes. (He takes files out of the source code control system without checking them out, copies them to a GUI code builder tool and works on them like that for weeks at a time, and then copies them back to his Linux box to check them in without looking to see if anybody has modified them in the meantime.) After that incident, he’d come to apologize and thanked me for the way I’d described the altercation to our boss, since I’d described all the mitigating circumstances and not played the aggreived party.

But other than that, mostly we get along pretty well. As well as being a fellow pilot, he’s also the most extremely left wing person at work – he’s had French and German flags up on his cubicle walls since Rumsfeld referred to them as “old Europe”.

Nobody knows if the people pawing though his computer files are from within the company or not. It’s known that the action was not initiated from this office, but he’s actually seconded to here from another department, so if it had been a company thing it might have started there. But his computer account has already been deleted off the local Unix NIS, so it’s likely that he’s gone for good.

One thing for certain – when they finally announce his departure, they’ll only tell us that it was for “activities not consistent with core values”. I doubt they’ll say he decided to take a long vacation to Guantanimo or that he was caught taking photographs of company equipment (like a mop bucket) in contravention of company rules.