An open letter to Utils Director Chris Sharek: Are you an idiot?
Sharek launches an internal investigation into how a public document was leaked to the public; Venice Florida! dot com asks the utils director if he is a total idiot or if he's merely on drugs
-- John Patten, 08/13/05
-- jpatten@veniceflorida.com

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From: "John Patten" <jpatten.venice@gmail.com>
To: "Chris Sharek" <csharek@ci.venice.fl.us>
Cc: "Marty Black" <mblack@ci.venice.fl.us>
Subject: A question of idiocy
Date: Sat, 13 Aug 2005 06:50AM EST


Dear Mr. Sharek:

After hearing that you spent city resources in order to try to determine who
leaked a public document to me, I have come to one inescapable conclusion:
you are a complete and total idiot, well beyond any redemption that
education could ever offer.

According to several accounts I have received, you requested the city's
computer department to track down who accessed your memo to OMI dated August
2, this in the hope of finding out how it got into my hot little hands.

Actually, I too am curious as to who gave it to me, but I'm not going to
spend a whole lot of time worrying about it. The truth is that I found the
document attached to my front door with no indication of who left it. The
document itself was so ridiculous on its face that at first I thought it
might be a mock up, a satire of how bad things have become at the utilities
department and how idiotic your management has been of our resources (and
these are OUR resources you are managing, we have every right to know about
them).

Imagine my surprise to discover that you actually did author the document, a
roadmapped admission of incredible ineptitude and incompetence. I don't know
why you just didn't bother to sign off with "I am an idiot" just above your
signature as you appear to be saying just that in almost every sentence in
the two-page memo. How can you run a department for a year and not know any
of these things? Were you out sick most of the time? Take a six-month
sabbatical? Develop a drug habit? Chronic daily bouts of narcolepsy? Help me
out here, I'm trying to understand how you could miss some majorly important
items that nearly all of the employees in your department (and quite a few
folks outside as well) were seemingly aware of.

As I now understand it, copies of this memo were being hand-passed around in
utilities for a few days before I even knew of its existence. There was one
big hint as to who left it on my door, and that came when I saw a second
copy of it printed directly from one of the city's computers. Go ahead, try
this for yourself. Print off a copy, then compare it to the copy I posted to
the web. Ignoring the web site watermark on the online copy, do you notice
any other difference? Like the fact that my copy is missing the internal
server address of the document's electronic location? Now, you and I have to
ask ourselves this: who in the city is capable of directly accessing the
document? It would appear that this may have come from someone above you on
the food chain rather than below.

That's gotta leave a nice feeling in your stomach, eh?

I'm not going to spend too much time worrying about it, but I do find it
hysterically funny that in your myopic stumbles you can clearly see the
ground but never the sky.

As to spending resources to try to track down who "leaked" a public
document, I can only ask: did Marty Black resign as City Manager? Is George
Hunt back in power? I ask because this smacks of the reign of terror that
took place during Hunt's final months. In fact, such inquiries were a sure
sign that Hunt was doomed.

For your own edification: you can't "leak" a public document. Wasting city
resources trying to determine how a public document got into the hands of
the public is an act of inspired insanity and cuts right to the heart of
communication problems between a government and the lawful owners (the
citizens, people like myself and my neighbors) of the resources that a
government manages.

The lesson that both you and Hunt have never learned: the more you crack
down on things like this, the more times things like this happen as the
workers feel that public knowledge is their only defense against such
tyrannies. You, like Hunt, will never learn this. As such, you are doomed by
your own stupidity.

For now, I will spare you the ignominy of appearing in a photoshopped pic of
the Monty Python Spanish Inquisition sketch, but one more act of inspired
lunacy on your part will earn you the honor. I am sure such inspiration will
overtake you in the near future, so I have a fresh copy of the pic on my
hard drive awaiting pixilation.

Please give my best wishes to you and yours. Have a nice day.

-- John Patten
-- Venice Florida! dot com
-- www.venfl.com
-- (941) 484-0488
 

John Patten is the head of Web Operations for Creative Pages, and has worked in broadcasting for over 12 years. He can also be incredibly rude at times.