"When I found out yesterday, dontcha know that I..."

It's amazing how much I hear about what's going on at the old place without really asking. The grapevine passed me this little nugget...

They hired a girl fresh out of college to take my place. It's no real surprise. It shows their complete lack of committment to the only hope they have of saving their company in the long run. Not that it's any comment on her abilities, I know nothing about her. The point is, if they were serious they would have hired somebody experienced, which would mean money - probably more than they were paying me - and they have no concept of what's good for the bottom line beyond today. But that's neither here nor there in terms of this story.

Apparently Franz scheduled a conference call with himself, the new girl and Tom, the guy at the ISP that had been a great help to me and Mike before me. Franz and the new girl, who I'm going to call Dottie for lack of knowledge about her, sat in the conference room waiting for Tom to call. Apparently 10 minutes or so went by and Franz got very impatient. Finally, Tom called and before he could offer any explanation, Franz launced into a tirade about Tom's incompetence and chastised him at length complaining and being his usual prickish self with all the artificial bravado an over-compensating wannabe could possibley muster.

When Franz finally stopped to catch his breath, Tom broke in, "I'm late calling because you gave me the wrong number to the conference room and I had to call someone else to get the right one."

"No I didn't, you're just to stupid to dial it correctly," Franz retorted, voice ruffled with doubt.

"You did. You e-mailed it to me. I have it right here in front of me," replied Tom who then proceeded to read back the numbers.

"Oh. I guess I flipped the last two numbers"

"Yeah. I guess you did."

Not only smooth, but so telling of his character. If I would have been there, I would have laughed my ass off. And he did it in front of the new girl, whom he was no dout trying to impress with his managerial brio.