It's been suggested that I was being perverse in giving this assignment to Charlie, because not only wasn't he a fan of social media, he hated everything that had anything whatsoever to do with computers.
I had inherited Charlie when I took over the department four years ago. He had been with the Bureau for nearly thirty-five years, and he kept telling everybody who would listen that the Bureau had gotten along without email for a hundred years, we could sure as hell continue to get along without it now. I tried for three years to get him to stop submitting his reports on paper, but with no luck at all. You might say that I was remiss in not writing him up, but everybody liked him, and he had powerful friends, and I didn't think it would do any good, so I didn't bother. And it wasn't like he was bucking for a promotion or anything, it was obvious that he was just serving out his last few years so he could retire. And then his wife Mary died, and at that point I don't think he was even looking forward to retirement any more.
So sure, turning the project over to Charlie had something to do with getting back at him for being a pain in the ass for all those years. But don't forget that I was short-staffed after the cutbacks in ███, so it's not exactly like there were people sitting around the office with nothing to do...
Except, of course, for Charlie.
When I explained the assignment to him, he looked at me like I was from another planet. Before I could give him a demo, I had to explain the concept of Facebook to him. He seemed a little suspicious, like he thought I was making it up. He even asked me if people actually enjoyed doing this, like he couldn't believe that anyone could actually be that stupid.
I started by signing in with my own ID, just to show him what the Facebook experience was like for a typical user with a few hundred Facebook friends. I could see that he was not impressed. Then I signed in with the special account that Jeremy had set up, so he could see the difference it made if you were a friend of every Facebook user, all one-point-one billion of them. I gave him pretty much the same demo that Jeremy had given me (luckily, I remembered Ms. ████'s name to use as a starting point), and he grudgingly admitted that it could be a useful tool. "So if the perps are dumb enough to discuss their plans on this... this 'Facebook' thing," he said, more to himself than to me, "we'll be able to track their conversations, one bad guy at a time...
"But what if it's a different language?" he asked me, almost triumphantly. "The terror cells don't always talk to each other in English, you know." I ignored his sarcasm and gave him a quick lesson on how to use Google Translate.
I could see that he really didn't like the idea, and that he suspected that I was making him do it as punishment for having to scan all of his reports into PDF's for four years. But he couldn't actually refuse an assignment, and he certainly wasn't going to make waves so close to retirement. So I gave him the password to the special account, and I told him that I expected a full report in three weeks. I almost told him that the report had to be in Word format, but I didn't want to press my luck, and I really didn't have time to teach him how to use a word processor.
| Next |  |
[ Everybody's Friend Home Page | Selected Writings ]
©2013 Henry Charles Mishkoff