Hiring is a tricky business. No matter how many reference checks, supervisor interviews and in-person interviews, no IT manager knows what he's getting until he leaves the office in the new hire's hands.

Sylvester Johnson, a municipal IT pro, was extra careful when he set out to hire another tech to support him when backing up the system and running and printing the utility bills that are sent to local citizens by the first of each month. The City Council approved funding for the new engineer, who would be in charge of Data Processing.

"I had narrowed the hiring down to two strong candidates," Johnson said. Both interviewed extremely well.

"But there were some questions I had to clear up in my mind about one person, because I did not feel she had adequate experience, even though she had a wonderful resume."

At her previous job, she did programming and backed up the organization's system nightly. Johnson dug deeper. He took the unusual step of visiting her current supervisor.

"He gave her an over-glorified recommendation," Johnson said.

He shared his doubts about the woman, but the City Council hired her over Johnson's objections. He taught her how to back up the city system and provided written instructions as well. It seemed to be no problem because after all, the city's computer system was similar to what she worked with at her previous job, an Eclipse 60 Data General system.

"It had the old Zebra drives with the 10 heads that float in and out between the disk," Johnson said.

He monitored the new hire for some time and concluded the City Council's decision was a good one. Johnson felt comfortable taking some badly needed time off; he hadn't taken a vacation in the two years since he took the job.

"Then it happened, while I was over 700 miles away, three days into my summer vacation," he said. "The first of the month was coming up and she had backed up the software over the current system disk! And it was payday, and city employees were at the facility demanding payment!

"I told them do not touch anything. I drove home and I arrived at the office the next day at 2:00 p.m. There she was, standing and crying that she had messed up the system. She did not know what to do."

"I immediately went to some system files that I kept on my disk and performed a system block restore. I had to slowly look through the files and see if any were missing. We were okay.

"I started a new backup and I told her to let it finish and call me. I had not gotten any sleep for the last 48 hours, so I was very tired. I had begun to fall asleep when she called and said there was a warning light. She had accidentally stopped the backup. I restarted it with no problems."

"I left the city about a three months later in good standing, and I heard the woman was told to leave a week later," Johnson recalled. He later talked with her former supervisor, who said that he'd wanted to remove her from his organization because she caused so many problems.

"I asked him why he lied about her performance," Johnson said.

His answer: "We had to get rid of her, and the city was the best choice."

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