This is a post about how the Internet is serious business.

Long ago when I was a younger man I spent a lot of time at an online community dedicated to Star Trek and other scifi stuff. This place was unique because you could join various departments modeled on how the Enterprise worked, and gain ranks because it was a super geeky place with a lot of wonderful nerdy people (Hi Brandi! I know you know my username here!).

A little background on how things were organized. You basically had a person in charge of a genre, and a deputy to help them. Then there were people who oversaw all the various genres and made sure everyone was playing nice. I was the deputy in charge of a genre. I had a "boss" above me, and then he had several layers above him in charge of running the overall site.

That's it for the background info.

So the Hitchhiker's Guide movie is set to come out. Like I said, this was a long time ago. I was a big HHGTTG fan, and so I came up with an idea to mix things up on the site and have a month long event leading up to the movie's release with fun events for the community to participate in that would involve every department and genre on the site. I came up with the proposal, and outlined it to my immediate supervisor over MSN Messenger because, again, that's how old this story is. He loves the idea, and tells me to send in the proposal.

Now this is where my Malicious Compliance kicks in. I knew he wanted me to send the proposal just to him via email. I also knew that this guy was something of a kiss ass who didn't really like the genre we were administering and got into that position by taking the credit for other people's work. I also figured he was about to do the same with me, and there wasn't a chance in hell I was letting that happen after all the work I put into this proposal.

So I sent him the proposal. I also sent it in separate emails to the head of the Entertainment department for the site, who also happened to be married to my boss's boss. I also sent it to her husband for good measure.

She sent me an email back seemingly confused. She loved the proposal, of course, but she wondered why she got the same proposal from my boss shortly after I sent it in to her and her hubby, but without my name on it. I played innocent and said I wasn't sure even though I knew the snake in the grass had tried to take credit for my work. I helpfully explained that I'd come up with the proposal and he told me via chat to send it in, so I sent it in as he requested.

Later on my boss had a snippy conversation where he asked me why I sent my proposal in to anyone but him. Again I played innocent and told him he'd asked me to send in the proposal, so I sent it in to the people who could approve it while also giving him a copy. He told me to send everything through him in the future, but at that point I had the ear of his bosses which meant I could effectively go over his head in the future since it was, after all, just a scifi fan site being run by a bunch of dedicated volunteer nerds.

Long story short, boss ended up resigning shortly after all of this went down. I ended up getting his job, and eventually wound up running the site for a few years before changes in the Internet sounded the death knell for an ancient HTML chat and forum based website with a dwindling userbase of diehards.

I do cherish my time there looking back. I learned more about working with other people and leadership helping to run a Star Trek fan site than I ever did from any college course.

Quick edit: I do not give permission for anyone to reproduce this story or copy and paste it to their crappy YouTube content stealing operation.