The job started out well enough. I managed to implement cutting-edge technology with a fairly small staff, saving the company a ton of money. But then a palace coup toppled the old CIO, and a new CIO was brought in. Unfortunately, the new CIO turned out to be a golden boy of modern management, with zero IT background.

To do his dirty work, he hired a slightly more knowledgeable middle manager who would do anything to make his master happy. He reminded me of Igor in the old Frankenstein movies, but maybe that's one too many film references.

One by one, Igor fired my staffers, replacing them with consultants whose not-so-secret agenda was to make their jobs look harder and more demanding so they could bill more money. As time passed, their mistakes became harder to sweep under the rug.

The Dynamic Duo's favorite phrase was, "I don't care, just fix it." I quickly came to despise that tagline. For instance, I was using Postfix instead of sendmail to forward mainframe SMTP traffic to its final destination. Unfortunately, at times the array of sendmail processes in our main Zurich office would refuse to sync among themselves, causing the system to reject stateside e-mail. Because the problem was intermittent, it required careful thinking about SMTP, external DNS, internal DNS resolves, and other technical issues.

We were working with Zurich IT to find a solution that both parties could live with, but Igor decided the process was taking too long. He called me into his office one day, gave me a withering look, and declared, "We don't care, just fix it."