It's the last day of the year and yet this is my first post for the year. Why do I blog at all? Others find blogging cathartic, some blog to document their lives, some do it to shout out their opinions, a few make money off their blogs. Except for the profit angle I could say I blog for the same reasons as others but I do primarily because it's an IT thing. I just have to know how to do it.I was on an emotional roller-coaster ride this year. My father died. I did well in my masters class and I got my post-graduate degree. An uncle died. The job challenge went from exciting to ho-hum. The wife went on official travel, making me a solo parent for a week. The comatose company that my friends and I put up years ago had a De Niro-style Awakenings only to revert back to deep sleep. These are enough fodder for blog posts, but i posted nada.
Then on Christmas eve I received info that my name was mentioned negatively in online newspapers. I checked it and sure, there was not just one but at least two references to me. The fact that it's negative and appears on search engines (Google this or this) make me doubly mad because it means it won't go away easily no matter how untrue. The news can give the impression that either I'm in the scam and/or an incompetent analyst.
It is reported that a rich electric cooperative whose billing system I helped revise, entered into an anomalous contract with an IT company. The contract was onerous, the IT company failed to deliver despite receiving full payment. The coop's new board and employees sued the old board that approved the contract. An audit showed that the old board approved the contract based on the mere recommendation of a certain Perfecto Hugo. But wait, I never evaluated any proposal for them. I never recommended anything regarding any project. The job I did was billing system revision, nothing else. Clearly there is some misrepresentation here, and falsification. Documents were fabricated and antedated to suit the board and in effect attribute something to me. My beef is now that anybody who searches for me online will be led to the untrue, unsavory, unflattering news reports.
I talked to the current president of the coop and the current GM. They are shocked that the supposed recommendation I made was a fake. They thought all along that it was real albeit biased recommendation to favor the winning contractor. Maybe be they even thought the recommender was part of the scam. On paper it looks like, as they say 'malinis ang pagkagawa'. The decision was covered by proper evaluation/recommendation. The winning company appears legit, although undercapitalized and registered just days earlier before receiving the contract.
How could a board of directors completely unknown to me use me? They didn't even know my full name. I signed their logbook as Perry Hugo. They didn't know my affiliation with e-novention. My only connection to them was their IT consultant who got me to do the billing system. He was the computerization consultant. But he has denied being part of the scam. Does that mean he didn't know why they gave the contract to the days-old company? He swears he'll never use me that way. He admits though now, when confronted regarding the fake recommendation, to getting most of the budget for the billing system. What will I believe now? Occam's razor should be used, I think. All other things being equal, the simplest explanation is the best.
