Random Whimsy: Movin' on up!
by Mark Woodruff, Special to AdBanter.com
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 What happens when a 19-year-old body-piercing kid from the IBM mailroom works his way up the ranks and grabs the ear of senior management to talk online advertising?
Read through an excerpt from a Mark Woodruff article that did not even come close to appearing in Fast Company magazine.
"Nineteen-year-old Spencer Piercy simply doesn't look the part as he roams the halls of stuffy old IBM. In addition to his nose ring and several other unmentionable piercings, Spencer sports black Converse Chuck Taylor basketball shoes, tattered jeans, and a T-shirt decorated with a photo of Mayberry R.F.D.'s Floyd (the barber) plus the caption, "Floyd Kicks Ass Big Time!" He changes the color of his spiked hair as frequently as he changes his long-distance phone service.
But despite his minimal number of years on the planet and his rather unconventional outward appearance, Spencer has caught the eye of IBM senior management, and even the CEO, by sticking to his guns and doggedly promoting his e-vision of how online advertising-or "e-advertising" as he calls it-can radically reshape one of the largest and oldest technology companies the world has known.
As many such tales begin, Spencer's begins in the IBM mailroom. That's where Spencer landed his first real job after dropping out of high school and faking a G.E.D. certificate. But when he combined his radical thinking and go-getter attitude with falsified degrees from Harvard (business), MIT (aerospace engineering) and Stanford (Internet specialties), Spencer jumped from the mailroom to a variety of lofty and sought-after positions at IBM.
Senior managers chuckle as they playfully poke their fingers on the colorful, spiked locks of their new rambunctious and surprisingly youthful e-rebel. Executives soon dubbed Spencer, affectionately, "Doogie Howser, IBM." The CEO even ordered that "e-Doogie" be inscribed on the corner-office door where this brilliant man-child continues to develop his e-visions that will-senior management has come to believe-vault IBM into a new realm of business success. It is the "Super Dooper e-Realm," according to Spencer.
To management's delight, Spencer has violated long-standing IBM policies in many ways. Most notably, he has printed his own business cards-in frenzied, vibrant colors-with his self-created title: Chief Executive Dreamer and Super Dooper e-Realm Guy." Within days, all IBM executives above grade level 12-2A tossed their humdrum, standard business cards and scrambled to mimic the wildly popular movement informally known as, Spencer's Rebellion. Business cards have been born proclaiming such titles as "Supervisor of High-Fiving," "Executive Director of Puffy Rapping," "Managing Director of Bitch Slappin'" and the profound "CFO-"Chief F--- Off."
Everyone who knows Spencer recognizes and gleefully accepts the novel idea that he simply is a radical, renegade thinker-nay, an e-savior-who just happens to have the outward appearance of a body-piercing punk. Recently, when it was revealed that Spencer indeed is just a body-piercing punk with fake academic degrees and four felony convictions to boot, he was given a seven-figure severance package and quietly escorted out of the building by security.
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