When you see the initials CEO under a person's name on a business card you likely think of Chief Executive Officer.  A common assumption, 99.99% of the time you'd be right... I can shed some light on that miniscule spec 0.01% exception... which I think you'll find entertaining.

I get inspired with all kinds of great ideas... with all due respect and credit for these ideas going to my Higher Power... and sometimes I come up with some nifty thoughts all on my very own, which I get to take credit for - truly a double-edged sword... as you'll see.

Over last weekend and into Monday/Tuesday this week, for no reason I could think of, I saw a preciptitous decline in the number of emails I was receiving.  Normally this is a welcome thing, since I receive 100+ emails a day, a momentary slowdown is nice.  This however became troublesome to me; I felt frustrated.  People and companies who'd said they'd emailed me were not getting through to me.  Now mind you, my inbound email didn't stop... it just seemed to be cut in half...and it was only affecting me, no one else in my company.  I was getting email from a couple of people on staff, but not others... but they were getting ALL emails.  It was strange, bizarre and a little disconcerting.  So through a process of logical deduction and elimination of one potential bottleneck at a time, I had the problem narrowed down to my mail server.

Mail was actually being delivered to the server, accepted by the server (did you know that your mail server sends an acknowledgement of each email it receives to every sender, even if you don't want it to?  It does.  So, here I was left with the truth that the emails people were sending me were being delivered to my server, but NOT my inbox.  My IT guys were confounded.  When I explained the situation to the person who runs the hosting of our mail server he was stumped for the better part of a full day.  It was a tough one alright.  Then he had an inspiration... and he checked the server log.  What he found was...

One day early last week I noticed that I was getting a lot of spam from a hijacked email address... no it wasn't mine (that happened a long time ago), but someone else I knew and I felt annoyed, like I was being singled out for email abuse.  So, the resourceful man I am, I thought I'd create an email rule on my mail server to delete all offending email coming to me from the particular server that this hijacker was using.  I was so clever... I delved into the header of the email, scouring it for the deeply hidden IP address of the offending spammer's computer/server.  Upon finding the offending IP address I inserted it into the rule and saved the rule.  I'd show this spammer... beat him/her at his own game, my pride-swelled ego told me!!

Ah, The Rule!  I was brilliant I thought.  I was clever I thought.  I was a technical smarty-pants I boasted to myself.  The Truth? 

The Truth, as I call it, is that the gentleman who runs our mail server found the rule I had set up, and explained to me why when he detected it, he deleted it.  The "Rule" I created wasn't a stroke of brilliance, it was a knee-jerk reaction.  I had actually put in one of the two IP addresses of the company that delivers our spam-filtered email...effectively deleting about half of the emails addressed to me.  Ha!  The spam-joke, as it were, was on ME!  I had created my own little hell, I had made my own frustrations, I had crafted my own little email-less nightmare.

Fun to re-tell the story... which I've done several times in the past few days... I enjoy laughing at myself, and letting other people get a grin and have some fun too!  And because I'm laughing at myself, others who are laughing, are usually laughing with me, not at me.  And even if they're laughing at me, so what... it's understandable.

So I recounted this story, first to my staff, and one of my people snapped back with extraordinary speed and pithiness: CEO (my title):  CHIEF EMAIL OBSTRUCTOR!  Sheer genius if you ask me... and the speed with which this person responded was indicative of the talent and fun this person has for what he does... pretty cool and admirable!

Now you know what CEO really stands for... at least with this story in mind!

-Peter