So stepping into our next case study, I'm happy to introduce our next speaker, Ms. Anuja Pitre, co-founder at Reach, Pune, India. She is currently working in her company, Reach, where she runs ideation and design. Her work is aimed at inviting people to engage in informed, accessible conversations relating to public and social interest. And also serves as a house illustrator. We are all very pleased to have Ms. Anuja Pitre here with us to discuss how we took a step towards empowering the citizens of the largest democracy in the world. So please welcome her with a huge applause. Thank you for the introduction. My name is Anuja, and I'm here today to talk about an experiment called The Sides. So I'm a visual designer and illustrator from Pune, and I'm a co-founder of a company called Reach, like she said. And earlier this year, in March, we launched a web app and initiative called The Sides. And what it does is it gives you verified, bite-sized information, sorry, about the government of India. And the way it works is this is what you see on your screen when you go on the website, a bite-sized fact along with its source, and two questions that help you go to the next fact. So when you click on a question, and it goes on and on. So if you're someone with some curiosity and an internet connection, this could entertain you for maybe two minutes or even two hours if you're really, really interested in the government. Why we made this was for the general election this year. And I'm going to go straight in this because I wanted you to see this before I tell you why we felt the need to make something like this. So I work at a company called Reach. And what we do is we create data collection frameworks for NGOs and CSR initiatives. And what that means is we sit down with them, we understand their objectives, and we assist them in collecting their data of their work and then help make sense of it. And what we do by doing this is we're very close to how data is actually created and the methodology behind it. So as people who work in this area, we started to get really, really sensitive about, say, things like misinformation and fake news that are becoming a massive, massive problem in this country. We also, and not just the WhatsApp forwards, I'm not talking about only Facebook and what gets shared on WhatsApp, it's also the news and how you can see when something is really dodgy. So when people are just randomly quoted or the sources in mentioned, you know that this may be taken out of context a little bit. So in that light, in October 2018, we had a big realization that we were only seven or eight months away from the election. And maybe it was time to do something. We were a very, very small team of four people. But things were about to get explosive. So we said, OK, let's just dive in now and see what we can do in the next five months. So what happened is we just arbitrarily started to devise, just validate what we were thinking in the first place. Our assumptions were that there wasn't quality information available, verifiable information available. So we went out and interviewed about 20 people in Pune in October 18. Ages 22 to 40. And that was also very arbitrary, because it was eight years older than us and eight years younger than us. And we just assumed that maybe since we are facing this problem, that is a good bracket to go with. So there were two insights that came up when we were interviewing these people that were felt by all 20 of them. The first one was that they all thought traffic in the neighborhood sucked. So that was the first insight, which we decided to park, because maybe it's a thing to solve for another time. And the second one was they were skeptical about the news that they were receiving. And everyone was saying, maybe this specific publication has this political agenda behind it. Or we don't really know if what we're receiving is the government even making valid information? We don't know what we're receiving. So this is something that we got all 20 of them said this. Something to just add here is then we asked them, OK, so what do you do before you go vote then? How do you make the decision if everything is untrue? And they said that they talk to people in their family that are elders, who they think have a better insight into the political system. So everyone said they talk to someone they think they trust or is informed. But other than that, that's their final word. So we took this information and realized that we needed to do something about, I mean, make a platform that doesn't feel like it's lying to you, as well as it is neutral, which is, in a sense, agenda-free. And that's a very, very tall ask from four people who are sitting in Pune trying to turn this situation around. So we decided to put our hands in it anyway and see how information is being presented to us right now. So I mean, take a look at, so what does it really mean to be neutral? OK. Take a look at this fact. It says the Election Commission of India adopted the symbol system to represent parties in 1951 when the literacy rate was only 16%. This seems like a fairly neutral fact. However, there are words in it that might form a bias, something as simple as only. And what happens when a word like only is used, and maybe it was intended to mean that 16% in 1951 is just lower than 74% today. OK, that's maybe all it means. Except based on what you've read just before this or what you've been hearing your entire life, you may think that 16% was low for India in 1951. Maybe you should have done better. Or that 16% was extremely low in the global sense. That every other country was doing much better than India, and maybe that's what it means. And if you just look at this fact now, it might seem harmless. But as these facts start layering in your mind, you're already forming a narrative that you don't even realize you've created. Maybe it's about how badly India is doing. Maybe it's about how well India is doing. So what we started to do was take facts like these. Started stripping it off all its emotion, interpretation, and what we were left with is pretty dry, boring facts. So we threw in some definitions, policy information, and now we were left with a bank of really, really dry, bite-sized facts. And now this is not enough for people to consume it. It's extremely boring. Imagine just seeing this one after the other. So we started to, there was a new challenge, which is how do we get people to actually consume this really boring information? Because we can't now go back and create, put flavor into it because flavor means neutral, not neutral. So we started looking at how we are receiving our news, and just a simple format would be an article in a paper. So this is what it would look like. There would be a heading. There's a start, there's a finish, and there's a start to finish narrative. And while reading this article, just for a moment, I think that there are five types of people viewing this article. One would feel reassured by what they are reading. So yes, this is exactly what I've been thinking. Two, one would feel agitated. No, this goes against everything I've been thinking about. Three, skeptical, which is I don't know where this information is coming from. Four, confused. I read something totally different before this. I was convinced, and I'm convinced by this as well. Or I'm not convinced by anything, and now I don't know where to go. A five, apathetic, absolutely indifferent to this topic, which, and all of these are extremely fair, because every human being will have their own set of experiences and will come thinking about this a certain way. And so be it, this is what the narrative asks for. But, and we've all been these five people at different points in time reading different types of information. And especially with today's day and age, when data is so available, data on personal profiles is so available, it's very easy to create content or write information to get these exact same reactions. So what we try to do is, let's see if this narrative can be destroyed, or rather, let's see if this narrative can be taken back into our hands. Is there a way to do that? So we started to break this articles like these down and extract verifiable facts out of them, okay? So let's just say this journalist has done their research and the first one is about, this article is about the Statue of Unity. And the first fact would be about the budget. The second is about how many people were engaged in making the Statue of Unity. And the third would be a little, maybe a little disconnected but still contextual, which is there were protests happening by farmers about the Statue of Unity because the funds were siphoned to the Statue and not them. And so it talks about a statistic about the district's working population in agriculture. So we took these facts and we just flipped fact two and three to see if the narrative still stays. Now the narrative says something, could say something totally different here, which is that's the budget. This is how many people are engaged in agriculture, but this is how much employment we created. And you're left with a totally different thought at the end of the article. And this is the power of narratives that we're reading in newspapers today, which I might add are very relevant, but if that's the only information that we're getting, then maybe there's a reason we feel like we're being lied to. So what we did was we took these facts and deconstructed them so that it could be read anyhow. Then we added another layer of related facts and we expanded that network to a whole other bunch of facts that we created that could be connected together and viewed anyhow. So essentially you could view this information in any order and that means you have your very own narrative. So now that we had this whole architecture, there was one last piece of neutrality that we needed to figure out, which is okay, this needs to have a face. People are going to use this ultimately as an interface and what would that look like if everything we stand for is neutral and maybe black and white and it's not the only way to go. So how do we create an interface that still is neutral? So the information that the inspiration that seemed obvious to look into was bureaucracy, which is in a sense more neutral than elected representatives. We've all seen what a stamp paper looks like. We've all filed our income taxes. We've interfaced with a lot of these documentation. So what we decided to do is take this as a visual language forward because that's truly what neutralizes this country, whether it means through annoyance or standing in lines or whatever it is, every one of us is interfaced with it. So this is what we took forward for our interface and the hero of our interface, which is what we've established here is that we didn't take the journalistic sources for any of this information. We took primary sources, which is where the information is first released. And then we added a layer of navigation, which is what takes you to the next fact and these are randomly generated for each user so that no two people have the same narrative. And we added a few more features to it. And recently a search button that helps you that helps you choose your starting point to the interface, which means that if you're interested in a fact about agriculture, that's how you start. And finally, the name of this, which is we realized that nothing makes sense if it's not placed with something else, besides something else. So this is what our app finally ended up looking like. However, sorry, I'll just take you through the timeline, which is from October to December, we did user tests, interviews, created the prototype. By February, we had an architecture design and development for that. We literally just went and talked to a bunch of people that could have been interested in something like this and we've put this together with barely any resources and everyone's come together to just make this happen. Of course, it's not a sustainable option, which I'll get to towards the end of the presentation. And finally, content and guidelines, content guidelines and curation, which is the entire thing that I told you about how facts can be written without biases and how they can be connected to form your own narratives. And finally, we launched in March. We continue to update it and build on social media, post that. But this is where stuff got a little murky because we wanted, there was a lot of promise in this and we were clearly meeting and we were looking into a latent unmet need, which was getting fulfilled and we needed to sustain this. So how do we do this now when new being neutral is something that we needed to keep in the center? We needed some money, which was even more tricky once we got into the neutral aspect of it. So when we started to look at what our options were, we looked at paid access. So let's just say this thing became successful. Would we put facts behind a payment gateways? And that wasn't an option. Because we wanted access for all. The second thing was sell user data. Now, as tempted as we were to use this user data because that would give us so many insights about how people lean politically and everything and we could design it accordingly and but we've now refrained from it and we've refrained from using it for anything else as well. Ads, this thing was already so dry that a layer of ads would just send the user away so it would be the ultimate anti-product. So we decided to not use ads. And the final thing was investors. And what we realized is we were too nascent and too young to align with the agenda of either an individual or a company who would come in either with money or resources. So that wasn't an option. So we had exhausted all our options and what I guess we were left with was our core idea which is using verifiable nuggets of information as a product. And what does that look like? So we thought of a different medium to use it in. Took a subset of that data and created a game. If you are familiar with trump cards that were made for wrestlers and cricketers and race cars, this is what we ended up making for the elected representatives of the Lok Sabha. And this is all verifiable information that's available in the form of scanned affidavits with the Election Commission of India. So we created this game and we did a crowdfunding campaign around it. So I'm just gonna show you the promotional video. By the way, we also made this video with the hope that we get to test it on these four kids that we invited to be a part of this video because by then we'd exhausted all our resources. So there was no time or money to conduct any user tests at all. That was our promotional video for the cards. And the fun thing was that we got these kids to actually play with the cards and at the end of it they'd chosen who their favorite politicians were based on absolutely nothing because they didn't know who those politicians were before they played with the cards and they chose them based on who this guy is, the oldest he must know the most or this is the youngest I like her. So it was a fun way to engage them in this and see what the future of these cards could be. The campaign is successful so these cards will be available soon on some online shop. Moving forward, this is what our analytics looked like for besides, which was terrible. So and this is something that we'd anticipated going in because it was an experiment, resources were short, we had no marketing budgets whatsoever. So at the end of this, I think what we realized is that that's not what we'd started off doing. It was an experiment and that there were a lot of disguised wins that we realized we came across towards the end of this. This is the start of our social media campaign that we started. So as she mentioned, I am the in-house illustrator and graphic designer. So this was something that was very easy for me to create. Again, we chose a language that was, I guess it just offset the politically charged nature of things during the time, which is why we used black and white cartoons. So this was the teaser. What we did later was we stayed away from content which required us to cherry pick facts from our website itself, which means that we were giving more preference to some facts over others and we wanted to stay away from something like that. So instead, we focused a lot on the election process itself. So this one talks about where your vote actually goes. So you're actually voting for your MP and not your PM and what you can do to check who is representing your constituency. Another type of post we did was the manifesto showdown, which is we compared different parties and the aspects, different parties on different aspects of their manifesto. This one was about published languages. So we showed what languages the manifestos were available in which also shows the access immediately. These were the other types of posts that we made, which is just to get people to understand what this app was all about. Another thing that we did to engage them is illustrations. This is a campaign called 36 Days of Type. I don't know if you're familiar with it, but we did one on election symbols that are made available by the Election Commission of India. And we did one covering each aspect of our campaign in our country. So this one was talking about electrification. The second one was about climate change. Third one was about sports budgets. And this is how we covered about 36 topics about India and that's how we decided to communicate. Of course, our social media was way more popular than the app itself because I guess that's the kind of media that people are used to looking at. And we also had an internal joke about maybe we should have just gone with the social media stuff instead, instead of making the whole app. But of course, there is something else that we learned from the app itself, okay? Which is when we were creating this entire content, what we realized is that designing for neutrality made us realize that we weren't neutral. So when we were putting together sources of information and seeing which source is better than the other or more than better, just what to choose to put on there because time was limited. We started to realize that we were favoring certain things over others. And maybe that's not the way to go ahead. Three people sitting in a room maybe is not the greatest way to create something that's truly neutral. So that was the first learning. The second one was that most of our study are angry and not all have the privilege to explain why. So we got a lot of qualitative feedback about how people were using this app. I think a tool that they got to use during the course of the election, including conversations with their own parents. The third is, and this is my favorite, which is we finally discovered a center for the left and right to meet. When we were doing our user tests in the beginning, we did an exercise called card sorting. And what we did on those cards was we just gave them 50 facts and invited a group of four people at a time that are more likely to fight with each other than anyone else. And when we presented these facts, everyone suddenly had a shared reality, which means that nobody was arguing about the facts itself. So only when they put, they said, okay, we have this reality now. We have this common truth. Now what are we going to do with it? Which means that they were willing to work. They reached a consensus faster and they were willing to work together to get to the end of whatever game we had planned for them. So that was one of the things that came out in the user testing, but also followed through right till the campaign, where the social media campaign, where a lot of left-wing activists, as well as celebrities were sharing our posts, and a lot of right-wing accounts were following us, including publications and newspapers that talked about how we were applauding the BJP's achievements. And it maybe was validating as a team for us to know that both sides were equally for us and they felt like we were on their side somehow. And the last thing, which is there's a way to take our power back, especially when the cards were out, we got asked a lot of questions about how does this politician have only zero criminal cases or is this politician, or have they only declared these many assets and is that correct information? And the truth is that is the only truth we have access to, which means that there is a way to get better information if you want it, which means that what we've done is at least given you information for you to then ask for better information. So this is somehow a gateway to get, to ask for better information, take the power back in our own hands. And the last thing we realize is we are as slow or fast as our society progresses. And by that we were wondering if this app would ever become trendy. And I think that was a question that we all had, which is we were struggling with all of this social media and say we planned an entire marketing strategy around it. Unless as a society we start asking for better information, we won't have any use for this app. But that is the struggle. So through initiatives like say, monthly cards and other things that are already engaging us and getting our mind space, we want to maybe nudge the society to ask for better information. And finally, this is how we want to grow. One is we want more decentralized content. And right now it is pretty centralized because the three of us are creating the content. And the third one is aligned partners, which is I talked about investors in the beginning, but now that we have a solid ground to base this on and we've realized that this is actually, this can be productized. We are looking for aligned partners to work with so that this can actually become a reality. And the final slide is, this is the first post we put out on Instagram. And I think we just circle back to this each time, which is imagine a world where every conversation is an informed one. Yeah, thank you. Guys. Thank you.


Karen, you think we engineered a vast conspiracy against you for years? Shish, you really think it's all about you? Well, to be fair, you're right, but still. You found the best place for your vengeful needs. In this episode, we'll find that some people bring happiness wherever they go. Others, whenever they, go. A coworker wants to take another man's position, and isn't shy about it. But when his victim looks him in the eye and draws his finger across his throat, doubt fills his mind. Enter a uniquely awful Karen, who is a pain to work with while she recklessly puts patients' lives in danger. Being a classic narcissist, she thinks there's a vast conspiracy being orchestrated against her. Well to be fair. In this case, she was right. Lastly, an associate director seems to have a unquenchable thirst, for pushing others under the proverbial bus. Until she encounters a coworker, with an email hoarding problem. Before we start, get the like button emotionally invested into the game of thrones, without spilling the end. Naturally, viewer discretion is advised. These revenge stories, might be disturbing to bad co-workers. I'm a millwright, who specializes in rebuilding natural gas turbines. I run with a very top caliber crew where everyone has a role to fill. My role is overseeing anything that's lifted with a crane. My technical title is rigor. If a load falls, it's my fault. If someone gets hurt while I'm in control of a lift, it's my fault. If equipment is damaged while I'm in control of a lift, it's my fault. The incident in question happened about two years ago, but we'll need to go back a couple years farther to get the backstory. I was a fresh member of the crew and had demonstrated competency in rigging, so after roughly six months with this group, my superintendent put me in charge of all rigging. I wasn't the fastest rigger, but I was safety focused and insisted on doing it right every time even if it took a little longer. This meant that my superintendent didn't have to watch over every rigging task and could go relax because I had it under control. Another millwright joined the crew about the same time I did. We'll call him Larry. We didn't get along at first, but after a few months we became friends. Larry was the act now think later type. Much like the superintendent I travel under. Larry was prone to making mistakes because of that attitude, but he was very fast and worked like a mule at all times, and I respected that. He wasn't especially skilled in any one area, so he had no special position. That meant sometimes he'd get put on less glamorous work, and I soon learned he was very jealous of my position as the rigger. At times, he would make comments like, I'm gonna take your job. Not in getting me fired, but bumping me down a rung and him taking my spot as rigger. He come up behind me while I was looking over my checklists, to point out something I may not have checked yet. If your supervision was near, he'd make sure he was heard. At this point I should mention this.  I was raised in a very strict Christian cult, but in my mid-20s I realized what was going on and left, at great cost. Losing my family and friends because of strict shunning rules the cult practices. Some of the stricter things stuck with me. Like I've never been intoxicated. I don't use tobacco. No recreational drugs. I speak professionally, without slang or colloquialisms for the most part. These traits stick out from a crew of men that travel the road and work in harsh environments, away from home for months on end. But Larry, he fits right in. Larry quickly became the superintendent's puppy. Bringing him gifts of his favorite alcohol, staying out late after work with him, even rooming with him on the road. I on the other hand, leave work, hit the gym, cook my food for the next day and make sure I get at least six hours of sleep so I can perform the next day. I realize that puts me at a disadvantage socially in the workplace, but I prefer to let my work speak for itself. Anyways. Fast forward about 18 months. We're starting a project just before COVID hits. About two weeks into the job, I have to attend a mandatory class through my union. It's a 40 hour class and in a different state, so I'll be gone for pretty much an entire week with travel time. I get permission from supervision and leave, with Larry rigging in my absence. A few days later, I'm lying in bed, stressing out about the final test I have to take the next morning. If the test isn't passed, the entire week is wasted. I always psych myself out before a test, but in reality, I don't have anything to worry about as I'm a good student and do well on tests. My phone goes off. It's a text from Larry. I love you bud, but I'm cutting your throat. I reply, what are you talking about?  I'm not proud of the response I came back with, but it's how I truly felt in the moment. I said, be careful about cutting the throat of someone smarter than you. I'm far from the smartest person you'll ever meet, but I do enjoy reading, studying, and learning. And being smarter than Larry wasn't an accomplishment by any stretch of the imagination. The next morning, I passed the test and headed back to the job. Where Larry had in fact usurped my position as rigor, and was lording it over me as a one about doing the tasks he normally would do. To be completely honest, it was kind of like a vacation at first. Get paid nearly $40 an hour to clean parts or torque flanges with no stress? Sign me up. But I was upset. I was upset because I knew I did my job better than he would. I knew that he got along better with the superintendent because of their similar personalities, but I didn't feel that I should lose my position, simply because Larry had more in common with our superintendent than I did. Regardless of that, I was now dealt these cards, and I had to play them. Just three days after I got back from class though, the job was shut down. As the virus that hit the world entered everybody's lives, and was just now sweeping the country. Out of an abundance of caution, the plant shut the project down until further notice. We were sent home for about three days and then called out to an emergency shutdown, where a turbine had crashed. We roll out and are on the job 48 hours later, in the middle of nowhere, Alabama. We get right to work.  Compared to many things we lift in a project like this, the roof weighs very little. The turbine rotor may weigh over 100,000 pounds, but the roof usually weighs around 7,000 pounds. Lightweight. But it is large and there are critical parts around the roof that can be damaged if not lifted carefully. Typical procedure is to be on top of the roof after it's unbolted, be in a full body harness and tied off to an approved anchor point, capable of holding at least 5,000 pounds per OSHA regulations. We then slowly take the weight of the roof with the crane, until it's floating, and then climb down off of it, and continue the lift until it's set on the ground or on a truck to be moved. The superintendent instructs me to go on the roof with Larry and assist him. Before I go, he instructs me. Do whatever Larry tells you to do. Okay boss. I put on my harness and climb to the top and begin to assess the situation. The rigging to lift the roof is 4, 5 ton chain falls. It's capable of safely holding 20 tons. Well over the weight of the roof. The crane is also well overrated for this lift, even with the boom extended all the way out in order to clear another building on the way to the ground. Larry has it all rigged up, but no tension on the wire rope slings. And then I notice his crucial mistake. He has forgot to account for boom deflection. When a crane takes the weight of a load, the boom flexes down. Depending on the crane set up and the weight of the load, it can mean that while your crane hook might be centered in your load with no weight on the hook, once you get the weight of the load on the crane, the crane hook could be anywhere from a few inches to a number of feet off center. Which means that when the load comes off the ground, it swings. Swinging is bad. Always. Enough weight swinging could tip the crane. Crash into equipment. Crash into a person. It's very dangerous. At this point, I start calculating. Is this weight enough, even swinging, to tip this crane? No. Not even close. Is it enough to break a chain fall? No, not even close. Are there any people working around us that could get hurt? Nope. It's just us. Is there any equipment that could be damaged if it swings? Yes. An electrical control panel, which is all power killed to it and has been disconnected. I decide to let Larry hang himself. He looks at me and asks what I think. I tell him, this is your show boss. He asks what I mean.  He gets nervous, because he knows exactly what I mean. Starts double checking everything. He still doesn't notice the boom deflection.  I stop him, and remind him to tie off with his harness. He doesn't realize it, but we're about to go for a ride. Generally, when I'm rigging, I first find out what the thing I'm rigging to weighs. It's a vital piece of information. If I know what it weighs, I can have the crane operator track how much weight he is on the crane, and I'll be able to know when the object should start to pick up. If we get to over 10% more than the object should weigh, there may be something stopping it from moving and we need to stop and reassess the situation. Rigging could fail, the object you're lifting could jump into the sky, all kinds of mayhem may ensue if a hidden bolt holding something together breaks, because you use too much force to lift it. I ask Larry if he knows how much the roof weighs. He doesn't. I do, but don't tell him. He starts signaling the crane to slowly hoist up. The operator complies and starts lifting. I'm watching the boom get pulled more and more off-center. We're probably two feet from the center of the load at this point, meaning a swing that could travel nearly four feet. I stop Larry and ask him to see how much weight is on the crane. 11,000 pounds. 4,000 more than what it should weigh. This roof is in a bind because we're not picking it straight up, but at an angle. It's either not going to move, or we're about to fly. I brace myself. Hoist up, slowly Larry calls over the radio. Boom. The whole roof shoots a good two feet into the air, and swings wildly towards the control panel. Larry and I are riding it like pirates in the crow's nest in a hurricane. We crash into the control panel, bending it over at a 45-degree angle, destroying most of its components. People start pouring out of the nearby trailers to see what the commotion is all about.  I'm smiling. Larry is shaking. He sees me smiling and knows that I knew. We get the roof set on the ground and are met by our superintendent.  He gets to me and asks why I let it happen. I just say, I just did what Larry told me to do. The superintendent is no dummy. He's seen a thing or two and knows exactly what went down. Larry is demoted and I'm reinstalled as rigor immediately. And a few shifts later it's all smoothed over. Larry and I are actually good friends now. We've been through a lot together and have each other's backs these days. He's now the foreman on our crew, and lets me do my thing. Failing your way to the top is still a valid way of progressing in my field. But I'm happy for him. He's actually good at it. And I guess that's all there is to say about that. I used to work at a hospital data center in the network operations group. We physically sat in a room 24-7 next to the servers, to make sure things didn't catch on fire, monitored for alerts, and did routine things like swap out take backups, but it was pretty simple work. This was ostensibly a tech job, but there were people who had been there for many years, back when you had to change out printer paper and run a command from an IBM mainframe. It was on really specialized hardware and software that was difficult to apply elsewhere, so it had become a dead-end job. And because there were people who weren't tech savvy at all really, we weren't given much responsibility. You can't tell some people they can log into a server and others not, so we were reduced to the lowest common denominator. We were a network operations center, where nobody was allowed to interact with any network equipment. Lowest common denominator, you say. Meet my new supervisor, Karen, not her real name but definitely her real spirit. She had been there for over 20 years and got the job solely based on seniority. She was a sociopathic narcissist and one of the most unpleasant people I've ever encountered. Shortly after I was hired, we were bought by another hospital and combined data centers. Karen was demoted to shift lead and had to work with us in the 24-7 rotation. She was very bad at her job and our responsibilities diminished to very little.  After a couple of years, I was promoted. On my first day after they announced the promotion, she said, You will fail. Just straight to my face. But she had a powerful tool at her disposal, the hospital bureaucracy. Since the place was unionized, the hospital had to just cause firing policy instead of an at-will policy, even for non-unionized employees. This is generally a good thing. But on the edges, it set up ridiculous situations where it was impossible to lose your job, unless you were really egregious about it with repeated violations, or you showed up drunk or high. We had someone steal computer equipment and they kept their job. It was nuts. And Karen had been there for nearly 30 years. So she wasn't getting fired without a lot of work. That's okay. She was terrible at her job. One of the most important things about the job, was monitoring for an alert which would pop up and there was a procedure we had to go through, in order for some data to go through. If we didn't do this, then a nurse wouldn't get their lab results back. So in one case, an alert came in, Karen saw it, then decided to keep browsing the web. Because of this, a patient from the cardiac ICU was going into surgery, and the doctors slash nurses operating on the patient couldn't get a white blood cell count or something like that. This was crucial for the procedure, so when these results weren't coming in, it created a dangerous situation for this patient. In the end, the patient passed away. Karen didn't get fired though, because HR concluded that what she did, or did not do, didn't directly led to harm. She didn't even feel bad about it. Just a complete soul as sociopath. I'm real pro worker in general, but some jobs you just absolutely have to do. I was so mad. She just had to go. I kept a paper trail of everything she messed up on. It wasn't nitpicky. Literal life and death stuff here. Verbal warning, first written warning, second written warning, final written warning, termination. I'd rather spend my time doing anything else, but that's the way it went. Then she figured out she could work the system. As she approached work Armageddon, termination, she would tell HR she was being harassed. The person harassing her was different every time, which would trigger a mandatory investigation. This investigation took about six months, they wouldn't find anything, and we would carry on. Except these warnings? They had a six month expiration. So she could always reset the clock whenever it got close. Everyone was helpless. Even the CIO couldn't do anything about it because of the bureaucracy. Karen was a menace and the entire IT department had to interact with the data center staff, and that meant interacting with her, and she was universally disliked. She had 20 years until retirement and surely would outlast the heat death of the universe. Then I had an vengeful brainwave, which sparked the following idea. What if, under the guise of developing skills relevant to the 21st century, required everyone working in the network operations center to pass the net plus exam? It's not a difficult exam, but it's not trivially easy. I felt pretty sure that everyone on the team fell above the line between able to pass and not able to pass, except Karen. We would give everyone better titles, a significant pay raise, and entrusted to do more with the equipment, which is something everyone desperately wanted. Then people could actually leave the hospital with transferable skills, and do something else if they wanted without feeling trapped. I spent three, years, in meetings with HR. With my director. With the CIO. With HR again. Job description meetings that took six hours to tweak small wording. Hundreds of hours in meetings.  Do you have any idea what it takes to approve a significant raise, in a bureaucratic muck factory like that? But the raises were crucial, because it would absolutely not be fair to ask this of them. Pass a test or lose your job, without a large carrot attached would lead to mutiny. But nonetheless, after all these hurdles, it got approved. I also wrote the exam requirement into my own job description. It was important to still be able to do the job and not let my skills lapse just because I was promoted. This also meant I could cover for people when they were on vacation or sick. Plus, I also got that sweet, sweet pay bump. It went over well with the people. I must admit I was nervous, but the plan made sense and I was able to communicate it that way. People would be more marketable, the job would be more interesting. And most importantly, they would be making 20% more than they were before. And I think it really helped that I also gave myself the same requirement, when I absolutely could have chosen not to. The hospital would pay for offsite training. They would still get paid there full hourly during the training, including shift differential for second and third shifts. We paid for all the materials. I scheduled eight hours a week for people to go some place quiet and study. The job itself had a ton of downtime so people could study, but this was formally carved out time anyway. We paid for the exam. And if they failed, we'd pay for the second attempt. We were given eight months to pass the test. I did not want Karen to have any excuse whatsoever and somehow convince HR that this process was rushed or unfair. Everyone passed on the first attempt except Karen. Karen did not pass her second, or her third attempt, a bonus attempt. Karen, being the classic narcissist, thought this was somehow all about her. That this was a vast conspiracy engineered over multiple years and hundreds of hours just to get rid of her, and she would tell everyone within earshot, that's what was going on. Yeah okay Karen. You realize how insane that sounds, right? Not everything is about you, sheesh. Well, okay in this case it is, but still. Only I, and two other people, knew that. I remember the exact time and date we told her. She was in such deep denial that it could ever happen. She thought she was bulletproof. I don't think I will ever achieve anything more satisfying in my career. I'm not usually one to take satisfaction in seeing someone's livelihood go, but she was uniquely awful, she was a danger to patients, and it had been nearly a decade of working with her by this point, and I was just sick and tired of her bullshit. The day after she was fired, I was a hero. I went to the main office for a meeting and people were congratulating me like I just had a kid or won a marathon or something. Even the CIO. We rejoiced and they were happy for me particularly, because I didn't have to supervise Karen anymore. But in my head canon, they were congratulating me for pulling off this elaborate plan. Morale back at the data center was also high. We learned interesting things, a couple of my co-workers left for better gigs elsewhere, the ones who were content staying were able to stay, and we all had more money and job security.  Her being gone was like a breath of fresh air. Newcomers were told stories of Karen, and they seemed exaggerated. I'll emphasize that they were not. In order to solve a very important and extremely difficult problem, I pulled off a vast workplace conspiracy that improved the lives of the people I worked with, in addition to keeping our patients safe.  I was building an online training module at work, that is intended to teach existing users how to work a new process. It has interactive elements, quizzes, segments to work through a few sample scenarios, etc. Now we'd recently got a new associate director, who from what I can tell, advanced through the company by throwing other people under the bus. She gets promoted not for her own merits, but because at the end of the day, she has less mud sticking to her than other applicants.  I'll get to that in a bit. So after I have the first draft of the module done it gets sent out for the usual round of testing, and there are of course a couple things that need to be corrected. I build the module off the notes the subject matter experts leave me, and a few things inevitably get lost in translation. But this new associate director just rips it to shreds. Complaining that it's completely incomprehensible, needs to go into much greater detail, asking questions about nearly every individual mouse click in the sample scenarios, and overall stating that it's impossible to follow. The thing is, this module is intended for our finance department, for people who have a background in finance, and have already been trained on how to use our internal software. She is a training services associate director, with a teaching background. The module isn't supposed to make sense to a former middle school social studies teacher, it's supposed to make sense to people with finance degrees. I push back and try explaining this to her in a million different ways, but she's having none of it. So I have to go back to the subject matter experts with her around 20 pages worth of criticism. And at first they think I'm joking. I had to forward her email before they finally believed me. So for the next two weeks we're going over every nuance, including readdressing everything that was covered during their three week classroom training. How to set up their network drives, how to set up outlook, including things as nuanced as, if you don't know how to set up your email signature, click here. I mean really basic, basic stuff that has nothing to do with what the module was originally supposed to teach. But I now had to include it all, because our new associate director couldn't find the on switch if you stapled her finger to it. This wastes my time, the subject matter experts' time, and time spent re-recording all the voice work. If you've done voice work in the past, you know you never get it in one take. After it's all done, I send it back out for review and approval, and the associate director simply doesn't respond. A week passes. The finance director takes an interest in why this module is almost a month overdue. I go to forward the associate director's email again. Except, now I can't find it. Odd, seeing as how I have a hoarding problem when it comes to email. I check with one of the subject matter experts I was working with, he can't find it either. Turns out, none of us can find it. It's gone. So I check with a friend of mine in IT who, after a little detective work, discovers that a week ago someone did a compliance delete on the exchange server. This basically is a seek and destroy for messages meeting certain criteria. In this case, a specific phrase she used in her email. I start digging through outlook, trying to find particular emails related to this that might be used to defend my actions. And they're all gone. Inbox, sent items, deleted items. Every last one of them. Any email containing that particular phrase anywhere in it. This kind of thing is normally used by admins to mass delete spam or phishing emails from all users at once. Except in this case someone apparently deleted emails that showed evidence of her awful decisions. My friend in IT can smell a juicy story a mile away, and was very interested in seeing where this went. She recovered the deleted emails and I promptly saved them to a flash drive. For the next few days, every time I had any email with this associate director's name on it, even unrelated stuff, you never know how something might fit together, I saved a copy to the flash drive. I informed the subject matter experts to do the same, and we started building our offline evidence locker. I didn't want to blow the lid on it just yet, I wanted to see if my suspicions were correct. Maybe a lifetime of watching spy movies and cop dramas had corrupted my thinking. Maybe there was another explanation. Who knows, it could happen, I'm not God, I don't know everything. So I'll play defense. So after several weeks in total trying to appease this associate director's unquenchable thirst for irrelevant details, and then getting ignored for a week, she finally publishes it and sends it to the finance director to approve so it can go life. The module, which was supposed to be a 30-minute online course, now contained three hours of content, and went down several irrelevant rabbit holes that had been deemed critical supporting information. As an analogy, imagine designing a training module to teach a nurse how to enter some new CPT codes, and being told you have to teach him how to read too, because he might not know what words are. That's how much BS was rammed into this thing. And the finance director of course hated it, and was surprised that such a rambling mess of a module would come from me, of all people. So he calls a meeting with me and the associate director on Tuesday to get some answers, and sure enough she immediately tried to distance herself from it. Tried to paint it as she made a couple suggestions and I clearly went way overboard. How I must have sent her a different version that she approved and switched them afterwards, that's not even possible, it would get thrown back into a draft status. She kept trying to talk over me as I voiced my defense, and to his credit, the finance director finally just muted her, so I could speak. And boy did I speak. I explained everything. I shared my screen, popped in my flash drive, and opened my copies of the emails that had supposedly been deleted. Every email exchange where she complained about the material, I pushed back, and she flat out ordered me to build the module in the way I did. She abruptly left the meeting and went offline. The finance director asked if I could send him a copy of all relevant files, and as I did, I also told him they might not be there later. And then explained what I had learned about someone in IT using the compliance delete.  The associate director never logged back on. There was a massive internal audit, where people from her previous departments were asked to provide statements. Leadership tried to keep it hush-hush, but you just can't keep something that big under wraps. I don't know the specific what's in house, but the associate director and one of the IT managers had both left the company to pursue the next stage of their careers, and we sincerely wish them the best. I don't really do the social media thing, but over the next few days as the rumor mill did what rumor mills do, I heard their shit absolutely blew up, and it came out that the associate director and that IT manager were having an affair. Now this all went down about a month ago, but as I wrote this I thought to check online court records. Both are now facing divorces, filed by their respective spouses. So yeah, there's a void in my direct leadership, in IT's leadership, and the entire IT department is getting a shake down by information security to determine if there were any other leaks. I spent some time reflecting on why this whole series of events happened, and my best guess is that she wanted to make a grand entrance by spearheading this masterwork training module that covered every possible scenario and contained any and all information anyone could possibly want. Then as she started to realize how wasteful, rambling, and unnecessary it was, she realized that her grand entrance would be a grand faceplant. So she tried to erase the evidence and pin all the nonsense on me to save face, but inadvertently set in motion the events that would expose her little arrangement with the IT manager. Taking it up the booty, in order to cover her booty, I guess. You stay till the end, which means you're the one I make these episodes for. I wanna take this moment, to thank you, I really appreciate you, because you bring me a great amount of joy. Subscribe for future uploads and show your vengeful devotion, by tickling the like button, without mercy. Do you have any experiences surrounding the topic of this episode? Share yours below, I'll join the conversation. And I'll be seeing you, in the next one.