View From the Bushes

It was quite an interesting day at work today. I had heard through the grapevine that the guy in charge of security for the IT Department had done some fairly questionable things with company resources (including, if reports can be believed, setting up an automatic file transfer which ftp'd files from inside the company to somewhere outside the company). Seems fairly cut and dried, but there was a twist. His wife had just had their first baby, and he was out on FMLA when his 'misdeeds' were discovered. In other words, he was on job-protected leave when it became apparent he was going to lose his job.

To be honest I'm not sure how that works. The job-protection is so that you can't be fired for taking the vacation, but it would seem logical that you could be fired for other causes, but the minute you get fired during this period the reflexive assumption would be that you were fired for taking time off. Not to mention the reluctance anyone would feel at firing someone just after they had their first child, so that was the first interesting thing to happen, and for all of the possible ramifications it still wasn't as weird as the second thing which happened...

So I get a call just as I'm about to leave, and a programmer who used to work for the Clinical Trials has sent us an invoice for a website he designed...wait for it...while he was working for us. Now I agree that website design was not part of his core job description but, come on, he was a programmer -- it's not like we asked him to paint or lay tile. Plus (and perhaps this is why it wasn't part of his core job description) it's just not that great of a website. At best, it represents maybe an hour of work. But more than that, under what circumstances could you conceivably send someone a bill for work you did while a paid employee?

Carpe Diem Quam Minimum Credula Postero
Ross