I'm back

I dodged a bullet this week.

On Tuesday I experienced my second-worst day of dread EVER, and I've been in some pretty dreadful situations.

At about 9:55am, I stepped out of my office. Best Friend Forever Vice President (BFFVP, the guy who made my daughter's electric bass) had a grim look on his face and motioned me into his office. He turned his computer screen for me to see and started reading an email that our food service vendor, who is suing my employer for discrimination, sent to our corporate office. It was also sent to my boss, and eventually found it's way to the state attorney general. As he read I could plainly see the URL to my former blog. My face went hot, my stomach churned, and my legs turned to rubber. I did an about face back to my office and deleted my blog.

Then I told Court. She was upset and wanted to come over to my office (we work at the same place). I advised against that, because I wasn't supposed to know that my blog had been pulled into the legal dispute between my employer and our food vendor.

The vendor was claiming libel, slander and defamation of character. This is the offending post:


I'm not sure how our vendor found out about the post. My best guess is the sociopath/ narcissist Googled himself and found it. Fucker. I checked my theory and sure enough, the post came up as the fourth or fifth URL in the search results. Damn. And deleting the blog didn't solve my problem because Google had it in their cache.

That's when I emailed Syd for help. And it came in droves. I really appreciate the way so many of our readers rallied around me. Syd, I love you. Meanwhile, Court went to work creating a bogus blog under the same name, so that Google's crawler could cache it.

About 45 minutes into my crisis, I stuck my finger in the wind to see how bad it was blowing. I went to see my boss. I needed to reschedule our weekly meeting on account EAP appointment that afternoon. He didn't say a thing and didn't seem agitated. If he read the blog he sure wasn't showing it (the most recent post had been about him!).

So far so good.

At that point Court and I got off campus (it was the lunch hour) and went home to take a breath and assess the situation. We are both devastated at the loss of the blog. I didn't back up anything (stupid). It chronicled our courtship, our near break-up, our wedding and honeymoon, and our happy life. It's gone. I loved that blog. So did Court.

I kept a low profile the rest of Tuesday.

Wednesday morning I checked with BFFVP for an update. He was encouraging. At about 9:15am I got a call from my boss. He explained the situation and said he needed a copy of the blog post for the attorney general to assess the damage. Luckily, it was still in Google's cache. I took a screen shot of the post, showed it to my boss (he chuckled) and he forwarded it to the AG.

That afternoon we heard from the AG, who determined that everything in my post was factual, and because I didn’t name the vendor's LLC or my employer explicitly, the litigants didn’t have a case against me or the post.

Throughout this whole crisis I never got a reprimand from my boss. It could come at our next weekly meeting, but I'll gladly take it.

And that's pretty much the whole sordid tale.

Welcome to my new blog. I've set it up so that it will not be connected to the old blog in any way (crossing fingers). I look at it as being in the witness protection program: new identity, new location.