the saga of dashing don part VIII: i swear

so where were we...?

ah, yes. don is in china; the cowboy is the new sys admin and has cracked his emails and shut off his access to the system; an official audit of the system unturns copious abuses of security breaches; don remains unreachable in china.

this actually makes things quite easy on the cowboy and friends during the coup. we need not worry that he will rear his creepy face about the office as we have received confirmation from the hosts of the china delegation that the group will return in two days. during that time complete power is overturned to the cowboy and the new tech contractor juan, who helps the cowboy in meticulously dismantling don's fortress of digital power.

you may recall that every technical contract our office had up until these developments was with one friend or another of don's. our office website is no exception. going back through the records we see that they have been charging us an obscene amount for what is an unnecessarily complicated process of getting anything up on it. i call don's friend dale, who i know from personal experience is crotchbat royalty, (duke or earl?), and ask for a meeting to discuss the contract, etc. we invite juan to take part in the meeting.

were a human face to appear next to every noun in the dictionary, dale's would accompany "slime". i explain the situation - that i am the new sys admin and that juan will be assisting us with maintaining the website, ask about what we really pay dale for. dale is smug as a bastard. the first thing he asks me is "ok, now who are you?" then he asks me my title. after the meeting, during which he insults juan repeatedly with laughable tech-knowledge pissing contests, dale pulls me aside, "can i talk to you?" "yes." "what's happening? is don fired?" "you know i can't discuss that" "don is my friend you know." "yes, i know that. i can't discuss it."

dale leaves in a huff. poor dale! poor, poor dale! may he shed a tear for dear old nepotism!

the boss calls the cowboy. he is asked to please change the locks on the office doors. but of course, therein lies a problem: don is still an employee. we have no way of confirming that don has received any notice of being fired even if we had given him one, which we are unable to do at the present time. i explain that we can't exactly change the locks on someone without having fired them first and that the new contractor cohort juan assures me that the lengths we have taken in the preceeding days will make it unfathomably improbable that don will be able to get back into the system. so long as we all log out of our computers at the end of the night he won't be able to do much other than brute vandalism if he wants to fuck with our shit.

several days pass and we know don is back in the country but have seen neither sign nor scent of him. one morning two days after the homecoming, nadia notices her computer is on. she swears she had shut it off the night before. i call juan who comes in to investigate. juan apologizes; how could i have been so stupid! he seems to say. for don had a back up plan. not only had he given himself network access on all computers, he had also installed himself as a user on each individual computer! logging in as such requires a minor step generally overlooked by the average user, does result in reduced access to network files, but nonetheless can lead him to some. don it seems had come in the night to see what he could do about rectifying the damage done. some things are missing from his desk area, ostensibly belonging to him anyway. some files may have gone missing, ostensibly belonging to the office. juan and i delete the last vestige of his access.

then we set about trying to fire him. not as easy as it seems...