Firing a Friend

The new building Data Constructs was in, was kind of neat. It wasn't down town, where you could walk out on the heated brick sidewalks and get Chinese from a lunchtime street vendor. It was a small two story office building on the edge of a residential neighborhood, with an honest server room and space for the company we had merged with. From my office in the corner I could see the neighborhood through a thin pine tree. To my right, sat my friend Hollis, who also, by nature of my recent promotion, was my employee.

Hollis was getting ready to graduate, so he had just one project left. It was a music classroom software, which did some cool things with tracks, allowed concert playback, CD production and had training packages for use in the classroom. It was a huge, ever growing project, which had not been scoped properly. I didn't know that then, but I can see it in hindsight. I had a project plan for the hours required to get this project done, but the marks were getting missed and Hollis was goofing off, a lot.

He was the guy who invited me to come play Command and Conquer with his friends, he had given me the basics on Flash when I first started. I shared lunches and jokes with him. I was praying for his family, as he and his new wife were trying to have a child. I knew how to be his friend, but I did not know how to be his boss. I was so subtle with my indications he needed to get his project done, that he either ignored them or felt secure in ignoring them.

"Hey, look at this," Hollis said completely unaware of my inner turmoil. He shut down his computer and slipped the disk into the floppy drive. He fired the computer up and it gave a standard non-bootable disk error. Unimpressive. He popped out the disk and restarted the computer and I started going back to my seat. "Hold on," he said keeping his voice low.

I walk back around the desk and he put the disk back into the drive. He started a program and it started with rows of usernames followed by asterisks. One by one they started to be replaced by readable characters. He explained to me that the computer's false start had actually dumped the raw usernames and passwords on the machine into a text file. Then, when he could start the program on the disk, it would, using a brute force method decrypt them, which is how they are natively stored on the machine.

Joe, the owner of the company, called me into his office to talk about Hollis closing his last project. He could see from the task tool it looked like nearly no forward progress was being made. He was tall and a little goofy, but this was hard. I wasn't going to tell him I didn't know how to manage. He told me Hollis had two weeks to finish the project and, if he had a day he didn't have significant progress, it would be his last.

Joe may have asked me if I wanted him to lay down the law, but I am certain I understood it needed to come from me. The room I told him in seems small and dark in my mind. Not enough room for the pounding heart, not to mention Hollis, Mike, another owner, and myself. He emailed what thus meant, he wasn't going to brought on after he graduated. He must have worried about his wife and how they would eat. He lashed out at me, but I don't remember what was said. I understood his pain. You have two weeks, I said, to prove yourself. To find work. It didn't matter, I knocked the bottom out of the bucket.

The next few days were a nightmare. It was clear he was doing just enough to show some progress, but not so much to get it done on time. Additionally, he started playing practical jokes on my computer, with my e-mail. They may have been amusing other times, but now they just highlighted the disrespect he had partnered with my ex-friend status. So, I got harder on him, making it clear today could be his last if he didn't buckle down. I got the equivalent of a sarcastic, I'm so scared.

I went to lunch with Dave, a promising new hire, who had really shown some great skill and imagination. It was a break from the role of friend turned boss, because I had always been Dave's boss. None of the shenanigans I had to deal with from Hollis for the next few days. It was good.

When we got back Hollis was no where to be found, but his car was parked outside. It felt wrong. So, in a fit of, "what exactly do you think you are doing?" I searched the building. I didn't find him, but I found something worse. In the server room, where I thought he might be enjoying the cool, I found one of the servers with a disk not bootable error. I popped the disk out and it was Hollis's little hacking tool. I don't know if I have ever hated finding anything more.

It would be his last day.