Happy Birthday to Mr.3-Here's Your Gift...Gossip about you!

Tomorrow is Mr.3's birthday, and he would be turning 35 under the name I married him under, 40 under the name that Kathy knew him under, and 39 under his birth name.

He's been on my mind alot lately: partly because of working on the divorce paperwork and my impeding legal single-ness next month; partly because of news of friends and colleagues getting married, having babies, and buying houses; and partly because of some juicy gossip that I heard about him which I will share with you today, as my birthday present to him. Oddly enough, when he has been on my mind, I seem to keep seeing him everywhere. Or rather I notice certain physical traits in other people that startle me into thinking that that person might be him.

Anyway, my birthday present to Mr.3 (and this might be one of the meanest things that I have said/done to him on my blog) is to share some delicious bit of gossip about him. My mom was searching on the internet the other day and discovered a forum for people who have been taken advantage of by identity thieves. The post originated from Kathy, but that isn't the surprising thing, the surprising thing is that someone who worked with him from the Eurasia group responded back to her. From the sounds of it, Mr.3 was quite the subject of office gossip. Here are some of the allegations (and I am not going to post the address that it came from in order to protect Kathy's privacy).

Hi, I came across your post and i got really intrigued because a man by the name of [Omitted to protect my brother] worked with me in DC before he was fired for plagiarizing, among other things. I now would like to know whether this is the same person. He claimed that he had received a PhD from the University of Utah.
Please let me know if this rings a bell.

And of course, it does ring a bell, because (according to the information from Kathy---which I haven't fully disclosed here-you'll have to wait until I write the book) Mr.3 wrote in resumes that he completed his PhD here at the U. His undergrad being at Florida State, his MA at Texas A&M, and his PhD here. The reality: he completed his Undergraduate here at the U and was accepted to the Masters program here with a pretty nice scholarship, but messed the whole thing up.

Continuing on....in the forum Kathy replied that this was the same person and that she wanted to know more information about why he was fired. Here is the response:

No one knows where he is.
But it's clear now that everything he told people was pure invention, including the fact that he was a widower. Also, his entire resume was made up. Before coming to that firm, he was simply in jail.
He was essentially fired after several blunders that clearly showed that he was not qualified for the job. He went as far as making up information and pasting sections from Wikipedia into reports.

It now all makes sense. He always invented an excuse to avoid meetings with government clients, because he would have had to present a valid ID. He also avoided flying, taking the train instead.
Quite skillful.
I wonder how much more damage he has done. And I wonder how dangerous he can be.

Ah, what fun. Let's tackle this point by point.

Mr.3 was a widower.....in addition to me becoming his sister in the new story, Mr.3's former wife was a Kurdish woman who died of brain cancer. Anyone who knows me well, can see where some of this has come from my personality: my work with the Kurdish political movement, my fascination with the brain and it's workings, and the fact that I lost two family members to cancer in the year preceding his new fictional life.

We've already covered his fake resume, but I love how the guy wrote that he was "simply in jail" before being fired. Just imagine the uproar that that caused. They hired him less than one month of him being out of jail.

His being fired for "several blunders that clearly showed that he was not qualified for the job". This is the part that fills me with mirth. Mr.3 is a smart man, no denying that, but he is also a stubborn man who insists that he is right no matter how good of an argument that the other side makes. He is someone who believes that he should automatically have authority in any setting. When you are not the one on top, this comes across as being "pushy". I've heard this said about him from his time in the Terrorism Working Group here on campus and it doesn't surprise me that his superior attitude was not taken well in a office setting. The louder and more Mr.3 pushes on subjects, the more that he insists that he is right, is normally a time when he is wrong.

The plagirization issue...hee hee hee, this so makes me giggle. Now, I've read every paper that Mr.3 has written while he was a student here. While reading one of his last papers he wrote before he left, he had an awful lot of book quotes in it. I remember advising him to not have as many quotes. His response was that the authors said it better than him. I also remember him saying that he wasn't at enough pages written in his papers and that he needed to "pad it up" with some book quotes. Now, this behavior is not that unusual in the life of a student...and well, it was his academic career, so I let him do what he wanted to. But in the outside world, and in a world where it is assumed that you have enough work and knowledge behind you in a subject that you can give your own opinion and analysis with authority, this behavior doesn't work. It doesn't matter how many smart people you have read in this situation. The allegation that he copied and pasted from Wikipedia cracks me up. I can't say if this is something that he did or not....but I think that he probably did. Especially after I heard from Kathy that she remembers him ranting and raving one day about someone at the office copying/pasting from Wikipedia and that HE told them not to do it.

Avoiding clients because he didn't have valid ID: and how many times did I bug him about getting valid ID? Mr.3 definitely proved that you can get pretty far without having one....hell, he managed to get married didn't he? By the skin of his teeth. I can totally see him making up some excuse not to meet with a client because of the ID issue. And while you might be able to avoid seeing a client if you are a higher up in the organization, as the entry level person that Mr.3 was in this organization, it is behavior that doesn't fly.

"Quite skillful." Very true. The deceptions that Mr.3 managed to pull off have all been quite skillful, but it is also true that skill will only get you so far. No other information from this person was given to Kathy, but just this little bit is enough for me to change some ways of my own thinking about Mr.3. I originally thought that he might still be in DC. But after reading this, I realized that (with the traveling that he did and the contacts he made) he has burned whatever bridges were available to him. He won't be able to go back into that world until he really finishes his PhD and people there forget his face. The name will be different, but people will remember the face and the attitude. So this also means, that he isn't in DC. While the New York option may be there, I think that in the course of work with the Eurasia group he will also have to avoid the Middle East analysts circles there as well.

So where is he? Who knows. But I have a feeling that his stint in DC might be the highest he ever gets. I think that he is probably enrolled in school somewhere again, trying to start over....trying to start over with another woman who will take care of him....but stuck. Stuck in a world where he will never be able to get someone to take him seriously. It is a sad life. One that I think that he deserves.