“I am a nobody,” said Hank, “just a guy with a family and a job, a middle-America type guy.”
Hank wasn’t his real name. He’d managed to keep that aspect of himself a secret. He was talking to me via a Google Hangout from his kitchen in a suburban house in a West Coast American town I promised him I wouldn’t name. He looked frail, fidgety, the sort of man more comfortable working alone at a computer than talking to a human stranger via one.
On 17 March 2013, Hank was in the audience at a conference for tech developers in Santa Clara when a stupid joke popped into his head, which he murmured to his friend, Alex.
“What was the joke?” I asked him.
“It was so bad I don’t remember the exact words,” he said. “It was about a fictitious piece of hardware that has a really big dongle – a ridiculous dongle. We were giggling about that. It wasn’t even conversation-level volume.”
A few moments earlier Hank and Alex had been giggling over some other Beavis and Butt-head-type tech in-joke about “forking someone’s repo”. “We’d decided it was a new form of flattery,” Hank explained. “A guy had been on stage presenting his new project and Alex said, ‘I would fork that guy’s repo.’”
(In tech jargon, to “fork” means to take a copy of another person’s software so you can work on it independently. Another word for software is “repository”. This is why “forking someone’s repo” works both as a term of flattery and also as sexual innuendo. Just in case you wanted to know. I think it is a very special sort of hell where you’re compelled to explain to a journalist some terrible throwaway joke you made 10 months earlier and the journalist keeps saying, “I’m sorry. I still don’t get it,” but that was the hell Hank found himself in during his Google Hangout chat with me.)
Moments after making the dongle joke, Hank half noticed the woman sitting in front of them at the conference stand up, turn around, and take a photograph. Hank thought she was taking a picture of the crowd. So he looked forward, trying not to mess up her shot.
It’s a little painful to look at that photograph now – knowing what was about to happen to them. Those mischievous, stupid smiles that follow in the wake of a dongle joke successfully shared would be Hank and Alex’s last smiles for a while.
Ten minutes after the photograph was taken a conference organiser came down the aisle and said to Hank and Alex, “Can you come with me?”
Read the rest here.
thats hows wars tend to start.
ReplyDeleteNotice Hank was able to get a new job right away, as he really didn't do anything wrong, but Adria is now unemployable, as she has developed a reputation for being hypersensitive, lacking self-control, and a walking lawsuit waiting to happen.
ReplyDeleteIf she would have handled whatever harassment she felt like an adult and confronted Hank and Alex directly, They would have stopped making the dongle jokes around her and she would still have a job.
It's very telling that the conference organizer had taken the word of the woman complaining, with no evidence other than a cellphone pic of the two men. Worse still was the way the man was fired by his employer on the strength of a tweet from this woman.
ReplyDeleteThanks for posting this
ReplyDeleteYou missed the best part.
ReplyDeleteFirst, Hank got a new job, and a decent one by the sound of it.
Second, Adria Richards, the "black Jewish woman" SJW who caused Hank such undeserved misery, is so toxic no one wants to give her a chance. SendGrid was likely very happy to be handed an opportunity to dump her, as it was clear this was not her first problematic episode.