As is fairly typical in our industry, Sebastian found himself working as a sub-contractor to a sub-contractor to a contractor to a big company. In this case, it was IniDrug, a pharmaceutical company.

Sebastian was building software that would be used at various steps in the process of manufacturing, which meant he needed to spend a fair bit of time in clean rooms, and on air-gapped networks, to prevent trade secrets from leaking out.

Like a lot of large companies, they had very formal document standards. Every document going out needed to have the company logo on it, somewhere. This meant all of the regular employees had the IniDrug logo in their email signatures, e.g.:

Bill Lumbergh
Senior Project Lead
  _____       _ _____                   
 |_   _|     (_|  __ \                  
   | |  _ __  _| |  | |_ __ _   _  __ _ 
   | | | '_ \| | |  | | '__| | | |/ _` |
  _| |_| | | | | |__| | |  | |_| | (_| |
 |_____|_| |_|_|_____/|_|   \__,_|\__, |
                                   __/ |
                                  |___/

At least, they did until Sebastian got an out of hours, emergency call. While they absolutely were not set up for remote work, Sebastian could get webmail access. And in the webmail client, he saw:

Bill Lumbergh
Senior Project Lead
ABCD

At first, Sebastian assumed Bill had screwed up his sigline. Or maybe the attachment broke? But as Sebastian hopped on an email chain, he noticed a lot of ABCDs. Then someone sent out a Word doc (because why wouldn’t you catalog your emergency response in a Word document?), and in the space where it usually had the IniDrug logo, it instead had “ABCD”.

The crisis resolved itself without any actual effort from Sebastian or his fellow contractors, but they had to reply to a few emails just to show that they were “pigs and not chickens”- they were committed to quality software. The next day, Sebastian mentioned the ABCD weirdness.

“I saw that too. I wonder what the deal was?” his co-worker Joanna said.

They pulled up the same document on his work computer, the logo displayed correctly. He clicked on it, and saw the insertion point blinking back at him. Then he glanced at the formatting toolbar and saw “IniDrug Logo” as the active font.

Puzzled, he selected the logo and changed the font. “ABCD” appeared.

IniDrug had a custom font made, hacked so that if you typed ABCD the resulting output would look like the IniDrug logo. That was great, if you were using a computer with the font installed, or if you remembered to make sure your word processor was embedding all your weird custom fonts.

Which also meant a bunch of outside folks were interacting with IniDrug employees, wondering why on Earth they all had “ABCD” in their siglines. Sebastian and Joanna got a big laugh about it, and shared the joke with their fellow contractors. Helping the new contractors discover this became a rite of passage. When contractors left for other contracts, they’d tell their peers, “It was great working at ABCD, but it’s time that I moved on.”

There were a lot of contractors, all chuckling about this, and one day in a shared break room, a bunch of T-Shirts appeared: plain white shirts with “ABCD” written on them in Arial.

That, as it turned out, was the bridge too far, and it got the attention of someone who was a regular IniDrug employee.

To the Contracting Team:
In the interests of maintaining a professional environment, we will be updating the company dress code. Shirts decorated with the text “ABCD” are prohibited, and should not be worn to work. If you do so, you will be asked to change or conceal the offending content.

Bill Lumbergh
Senior Project Lead
ABCD

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