The Cover Up - Use Terrorism

The management meeting started with Darth passing out a short IQ/creativity test
which can be found in most brain puzzle books. The test was a series of mathematic
operations in which the conventional meaning of mathematic signs had been changed. For example, the instructions may state that the + sign means to multiply instead of adding thenumbers. Thus, in a series of math operations you have to remember what the new mean-ing for each sign is. Since I had seen the test before and knew what it was, I deliberately plodded through it and made sure I was the last of the group to complete it. As long as everyone was playing for a dummy, I thought it was best to live up to the image. After the test, we went on to cover the assigned topic.

A discussion of trust in management arose and I related a story of how I had worked for a person for 2 years without missing a day of work. Then one day I became ill and forgot to call in to tell the office I would not be coming in that day. I was home sleeping in the bedroom when the phone in the kitchen rang. I managed to get out of bed and make it to where the phone was located just in time to have the person calling hang up on me. It turned out it had been my boss calling me and I related how it really bothered me that my boss didn't trust me and had to call, wake me up, get me out of bed and then hang up on me. I said it was really an annoying experience.

The next day at work, I was working in the laboratory and my phone rang in my office. I made a mad dash to my phone, picked it up and heard a dial tone. The party had hung up!, It could have been a coincidence except that this was to become a routine the rest of my stay at Delta Oil. Usually, the calls would come at times when I was far removed from my office. I just accepted the calls as part of the planned harassment to drive me out of the company. It didn't even occur to me at the time that all other managers had their calls answered by the company switchboard operator when they were not in their office. What I did not understand was why “they” waited until I had mentioned it before that form of harassment began. Everyone knows that hanging up the phone on someone is highly irritating. I couldn't understand why that form of irritation was done to coincide with any
comments I made at the management meeting. I never consider the possibility that someone wanted to make me look paranoid or even worse, to make me paranoid.