To do his dirty work, the CIO hired a slightly more knowledgeable middle manager who would do anything to make his master happy. This guy reminded me of Igor in the old Frankenstein movies.

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." 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 between 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."

I knew what that meant: hire more consultants, which he did. They didn't even know what Postfix was. So they charged us US$20,000 for a diagram of email flow and recommended they be given more time to study the problem. Igor thought that was great and gave them the green light. As a result, these bozos are currently burning through the company's money at an impressive clip.