In came the new hire, a guy the boss loved (there is some blatant ethnic and gender favoritism at work here, oh joy) who was supposed to replace our webmaster but soon wormed his way into my project. He started sending everybody long (and often erroneous) lists of everything I was doing wrong, under the guise of helping with the quality-control effort. I spent a bunch of extra time just responding to this shithead's messages. Once I was reasonably certain the project was ready to go, and having heard gossip that the higher-ups intended Shithead to take over all along, I told my boss I wasn't interested in leading it any more and handed it over to Shithead, who supposedly did a bunch of coding (in the obsolete language) and got it running smoothly (or so he proclaimed loudly and at length in staff meetings).
So now it's crunch time again, and things are a lot easier for me now that I'm not responsible for the finished product. Shithead, on the other hand, seemed to be having some trouble late last week. This morning I found this email from the boss in my inbox:
[Shithead] worked until 10:15 p.m. Friday to fix the [same] problem [I had, which he had supposedly written a fix for], probably due to [the same issue I ran into and warned him about before I handed the project over]. No error messages to go by. [I don't know why not. I always got error messages, or maybe he just didn't know where to look.]I am trying SO hard to resist the urge not to send out an "I told you so" email to the entire office. So hard.
[The process] finished at 11:23 p.m. Friday.
[Edited after lunch to add:] My first reaction was that sending an email would be in poor taste, but after talking to a colleague I decided I couldn't afford not to send something out. Apparently this guy has been sending a ton of emails to the way-higher-ups about other people and their work, trying to blame them for his own failings. I haven't been getting these, and none of them have blamed me specifically (that anyone knows), which is why I didn't realize until just now just how sleazy this guy is. It's hard for me to believe that the higher-ups are taking him seriously, but I don't think I want to take my chances. So I sent an email out to everybody saying, essentially, "I'm surprised that this is a surprise; I told [Shithead] when I handed the project over to him that he needed to watch for [issues]. Specifically, on page 66 of the revised documentation I sent out on March 31st (email attached), I wrote [blah, blah, blah]." So there. I might have overdone it, but better that than to be screwed any further by Shithead.
