The Wrong Job Title

Konstantin started his new job in marketing on a Monday. Before he arrived, the office had sent him a friendly welcome email. It was full of useful details, and it contained one small mistake. It called him "our new IT specialist."

He noticed it only after he got there, and by then it was too late. At the front desk, the receptionist shook his hand warmly. "Oh, thank goodness," she said. "Our printer has been broken since Thursday."

Konstantin opened his mouth to explain. Then a woman hurried over to ask about a forgotten password. A man behind her said his computer was "doing a strange blue thing." Konstantin was actually quite good with computers. He decided to help first and explain later.

That was the real mistake. By Tuesday, he had fixed three printers. By Wednesday, he had changed fourteen passwords and rescued a lost spreadsheet from a trash folder. People had started calling him "the lifesaver." Somebody brought him a cake.

Meanwhile, nobody had given him a single marketing task. His real manager, who also believed the email, kept telling him, "Take your time. You're clearly busy."

On Thursday evening, he sat at his desk with a headache. He had come here to write campaigns, and he had not written one word. He had a list of IT requests longer than his arm. His drawer was full of cables that people had given him.

On Friday, he finally stood up in the team meeting. "I have to tell you something," he said. "I'm not the IT specialist. I work in marketing. The email was wrong."

Nobody spoke. Then his manager began to laugh so hard that she had to put down her coffee.

"So who has been fixing our printers?" she asked.

"I have," Konstantin said. "I should have said something on Monday. But everything was already breaking."

"Honestly, you did the job better than the last guy," a colleague said.

The following Monday, a tall man named Werner arrived with a laptop bag and a big smile. "Hello, I'm the new IT person," he said. "I hear you've been keeping my chair warm."

Konstantin shook his hand. "It's all yours," he said. "The printer on the second floor makes a terrible noise. The password list is in the blue folder. Good luck."

Then he went to his own desk and opened a blank document. At the top of the page, he typed: "Campaign ideas."