Alvin had the fortune of working with an exceptional talent while he was employed at Virtucon. Bart knew how to do everything from desktop support to software development to database administration to IT security. Not only was he proficient in all of them, he also knew them better than those with many years of experience.

Bart had been with Virtucon since the early days, racking up nearly 20 years of tenure. During this time, he 'mastered' everything and asserted himself to the point that no changes could happen without his approval. His changes were auto-approved because of course any idea he had was a good one. This led to myriad problems for fellow IT people like Alvin, who were hired after Bart.

"Be wary of Bart," Alvin was warned by his coworker Bob, who was Bart's junior by a couple years. "He has a long history of buffoonery, yet has somehow ascended to the #3 position in IT." Alvin sipped on a generous mug of coffee while Bob regaled with the Ballad of Bart. From the time he was just a helpdesk intern that put his shoulder through a core switch after tripping while carrying boxes, Bart was wrecking things.

When Bart worked his way up to server support, he 'fixed' an Exchange issue by restoring a backup into production without warning because "It worked when the backup was taken." When he was assigned a web server problem, he spent a few days troubleshooting it without asking for any help. When he finally gave in, he told Bob that he couldn't figure out a frustrating IIS HTTPS binding issue. Bob explained to him that something else had to be the problem because the server was running Apache 2.4 on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS.

When Bart added software development to his repertoire, he clearly didn't understand how code changes worked. Or code repositories for that matter. He always wanted to be the one to fix problems, so he would stick his nose in code that it didn't belong.

Bart once tried to make fee schedule changes to accounting software by opening its PowerBuilder libraries in Notepad++. He proceeded to print out the .PBL and use a pencil to scribble out every value from the old schedule and wrote in the new ones. He then scanned his penciled changes in as a PDF and emailed it to Bob to implement.

Frustrated, Bob spent an entire day showing Bart how their GitHub repositories worked. He seemed to understand, so Bob went on his way. While Bob hoped Bart wouldn't actually produce any more code, perhaps it would save their printer some toner if he did. The next day, all the developers were complaining to Bob that they couldn't access GitHub. It turns out Bart saw GitHub as a threatening malicious code breeding ground so he had a network admin block it on the firewall. He then sent an email to development staff explaining this and that they were supposed to now use 'BartHub', a file share he set up on his own computer.

Bob and the developers managed to distract Bart by pointing out how the DBA team needed help. The first thing he did was try to create an SSRS report using a series of text boxes in a grid to make a matrix. The DBA's had a good laugh at that until Bart started to commit worse atrocities.

One day an entire metrics database suddenly became a bunch of null values, which is not very helpful for metrics. Bart threw a fit because the data he was working on was gone. He demanded whomever messed up the data be hunted down. He suggested that missing historical data could be found by performing 'key triggers', whatever those were. He emphasized his point by making hand motions like he was scrambling a Rubik's cube. They ignored him and a lead DBA ran a profiler trace to find that the unconstrained null updates came from... Bart's workstation.

Alvin had long since imbibed his coffee when Bob finished his story. Bob turned back to his workstation to check his email, "Oh, would you look at that. I guess we have some changes up top!" The email stated that the current VP of IT was announcing his retirement after 30 years at Virtucon. The CTO would be taking on that new role at the end of the month.

The transition plan began and the CTO was groomed to take over. That plan was shredded a week before it was to take place because the CTO suddenly found himself unemployed. The finance department was investigating his use of the company credit card and found thousands of dollars in personal charges, so he was unceremoniously terminated. Turmoil gripped the office as an entire department waited to find out who their new leader would be.

Everyone except Bart put in a good word for Bob to become the next VP of IT. At minimum, they should hire someone from the outside. Pretty much anyone but Bart was the popular suggestion.

Bart predictably put in a good word for himself and talked a big game about all of his expertise. He added security expert to his resume by talking about disabling his home WIFI’s SSID broadcast and changing the default password. Then there was the previously-unmentioned experience as an IT Project Manager where he apparently led several teams at Schmoeing.

That Friday, that dreaded email with the subject New VP of IT came out. Being the most tenured person remaining while having "great leadership qualities," Bart got the promotion and Bob didn't. Many job search sites probably thought they were getting a DDoS attack over the weekend while everyone in Virtucon IT looked to abandon ship. Bart's reign of terror lasted 18 months before Virtucon realized they made a grave mistake. Bob, Alvin, and many others weren't around to see the way it all ended.

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