One cold December morning, the Riddler approached HPDEB and I about sitting in on a WebEx (a live Web meeting) to review a project with a medical contributor later in the morning or early afternoon. Although we think WebEx is a smelly turd, we accept as part of our punishment for sins in past lives and go out to get a morning donut/coffee combo.

The Riddler comes barrelling out of the building right behind us in his shirtsleeves, telling us that Dr. X can only talk to us now, right that minute. We check the time. It’s 1 hour before the scheduled meeting, scheduled on our calendars by the Riddler. Apparently he wrote down the wrong time.

We shrug and see head back upstairs, having had the first glimpse of what was about to unfold. We go into the boardroom to launch WebEx for the meeting. The phone rings and the Riddler answers it immediately - it’s unit23’s girlfriend. The Rid says “just a second.. I’ll transfer you” and hangs up on her.

WebEx does not load properly, and the Rid has no idea why. It sits. We wait. The Rid calls Dr. X, who has not received any WebEx email invitation yet. The Rid says he’ll send him a normal email, but he can’t do that from our piece of shit contact management system, so after making him wait, he goes to his own office to do it, while Dr. X sits on the phone in silence.

It should be mentioned at this point that Dr. X is probably one of the busiest doctors in our city.

Minutes (MINUTES) later, the Rid returns, to find out Dr. X got that email, so he sends another WebEx email. This one gets filtered to Dr. X’s spam/trash, and when he tries to retrieve it, it crashes Outlook. He tries again. Outlook crashes again. The Riddler, apparently panicking, jumps out of his chair and leaves the boardroom and runs back to his office. We maintain our code of silence. Omerta. Even in the face of Dr. X’s pleas:

“Hello?”
“Hello?”
“Is anyone there?”
“Hello? What’s happening?”
“Just tell me when someone’s there.”

The Rid recomposes himself and returns, and walks Dr. X through a process of removing all his junk mail filters just to get to the WebEx email. The email finally gets there and it works. Except by this time the Riddler had cancelled the WebEx session that email referred to.

Eventually the Riddler cancels everything and starts a new WebEx meeting from his office computer. We all move to his office and the meeting begins and ends.

The punchline? The original plan for this meeting was to take a 5 minute cab ride over to Dr. X and walk him through in person. True to form, we opted for humiliation over competence. This meeting spawned a new acronym. ADOI. Astonishing Display of Incompetence.

Dr. X has publicly burninated all ties with us.

Commentary

I get uncomfortable and fidget-y just thinking about that.
- Shuh