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Fishing from the pier
Posted on January 11, 2007 5:12 PM
I'm just sittin' on the dock of the bay. Wastin' time. That's an Otis Redding lyric. Cool song from a time when songs and singers didn't need videos or podcasts or blogs to let people know they were cool.
I could fish from a pier, if I wanted to. I might catch something to eat. I'd probably catch an old World War 2 mine, with just enough time to wonder what was so heavy on my line before getting fired the really old fashioned way.
If you can believe a commenter on Valleywag claiming to know why Microsoft's once-rising star Martin Taylor got the pink slip express out of Seattle or Redmond or wherever they are, ol' Martin was fishing from the pier.
That's what you might call a euphemism...
The rumor mill in Redmond is that Taylor was spending a lot of time time fishing off the company pier, and that he had been doing that for years, but that isn't what got him fired.From the brief times I've been inside the bowels of corporate America, I've only ever seen one thing get someone's butt tossed out the door at warp speed, and that's sexual harassment. You can have people who barely qualify for homo sapien status piloting the company into the path of an iceberg, sound a warning, and no one cares.
What got him fired was that he was arranging for a woman-who-was-not-his wife to come with him on business trips, even though she had no reason to go on those trips. She was then filing expense reports for those trips.
Good to know that in Redmond you can ship shitty products and not get fired, but if you bill the company for flying your mistress/subordinate around the country your days are numbered.
Offer to cast your bait into a nice looking pond, and you may as well fire up the greatest search engine in the world and start looking for a new pier.
Um, I'm right about what fishing off the pier means, right?
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