The Times had a story on Lee Kyriacou, who resigned as head of an obscure state agency in December. He had been accused of misusing state employees at the Office of Real Property Services The article says,
If his daughter needed to be picked up from a doctor’s office and taken to school, he would ask his assistant to drive her. Because he said he could not be bothered with mundane tasks like filling out a time sheet or logging the miles he drove in a state-owned vehicle, he ordered subordinates to do them for him.
When the inspector general’s office asked Mr. Kyriacou about those requests, he testified “that he lacked organizational skills and relied on his personal assistant to manage his travel and schedule personal appointments and commitments,” the report said. He said he believed that his assistant could handle those tasks because she “wasn’t doing anything.”
The only reason I noticed the story, was because his name and picture caught my eye. Many moons ago, I used to work at the Boston Consulting Group with him. I was doing Mac/network/voice-mail support for the office, and he was a consultant there.
Geeky aside: Yes, in those days, voice-mail was king..external e-mail, a semi-novelty. I was the only guy in the office with an Internet connection, and hadn’t even see the just released Mosaic web browser. (One my last acts at BCG was to convince a small architecture firm which owned the domain 'bcg.com', to give it to us...for free. Who da man?)
Anyways, I didn’t have a ton of interaction with him, but it was a small office back then, and we certainly knew each other. I was the ‘go-to’ tech guy (it was an all-Mac office).
A state investigator has found no laws were broken, and Kyriacou has gone back to the private sector.The reporter writes,
Mr. Kyriacou’s actions appear simply to be a failure to adjust to the culture of state government, which requires that the most picayune details about the use of public resources be accounted for and recorded.
Though the consultants were all pretty full of themselves, I remember him to be a nice guy, and not everyone there was. I can also tell you, that at BCG, there would be no way he would not be filling out timesheets. Everyone did. That was rule #1, 2, and 3.
As for the other stuff, if you were a nice person, you could probably get your admin to do that stuff, and if he/she didn’t want to, you could get another admin. That option may not have been available in his state gig, but come on, I would think you have to be acting objectively assh*lish, for things to come to this.
So, Teapot Dome this is not, but there is never an excuse to be a jerk.
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