Google food manager charged with double-dealing
The brouhaha over Google's once-legendary, now troubled free-meals perk has bubbled up more charges of wrongdoing in the search engine's kitchens. An anonymous poster has taken to Craigslist to air charges against Google's former global food manager, John Dickman. (The post refers to him as "Dick," but it's obviously Dickman being discussed.) The Craigslist poster claims Dickman, left, who is married to Lisa McEuen, right, an executive at the parent company of food-service operator Bon Appétit, with leaking inside information which helped Bon Appétit win a contract to run Google's in-house meal service.The poster claims Dickman then arranged to get a kickback from Bon Appétit. Google, he goes on to write, investigated Dickman and Bon Appétit, going as far as testing fruits and vegetables, presumably to see if they met Google's high standards for organic and sustainable ingredients. The implication there: Bon Appétit had been feeding Googlers slop dressed up as fancy fare. The end of the Craigslist poster's story: Dickman was brought before Google's board and fired. All juicy gossip — but there's one thing that doesn't make sense about this whole tale. Dickman is now working at Apple, a company with close ties to Google. Google CEO Eric Schmidt is on Apple's board of directors. Apple directors Bill Campbell and Al Gore are important advisors to Schmidt. If Dickman left Google in a cloud, how could he possibly land a job at Apple? Either the poster's allegations aren't true — or something darker is going on here. One possible explanation: Google's leaders might have arranged for Dickman to get a job with their friends at Apple in exchange for buying his silence on other matters. Here are excerpts from the original post on Craigslist:
Disclaimer: I don't work at Google. I probably never will. I'm not smart enough. As far as I can tell, almost nobody is. So it goes. From a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend, comes the following strange story ... It seems that once upon a time, there was a guy - we'll call him Dick. 'Dick' was director of food services for a really big dot-com. 'Dick' had a wife. She was a highly placed executive at Bon Appetit.... It's not clear exactly HOW Bon Appetit came to acquire the Go^H^H big dot-com's contract. Right there, some thorny questions can be asked ... like, whether inside information influenced Bon Appetit's bid? ... It seems that 'Dick' negotiated, it is alleged, two deals - the second deal translated into a end-of-the-year 'rebate' check being cut by B. A. and delivered to, yes, you guessed it, 'Dick'. To make matters worse B. A., it has been said, did not deliver what they contracted to deliver, to big dot-com's cafeteria(s). Apparently there was a little watering down of quality, a little substitution here and there going on. Big dot-com, it is said, did an audit. What sort of audit? It seems likely that there were private investigators involved ... I'd surmise a few bugs, here and there ... and maybe some chemical and DNA profiling of fruits and vegetables. (If 'Dick' was like every other 'dick' I've ever known, he lined up every week to have his car detailed by the inhouse auto detailing service - so installing a bug in his car, as well as retrieving the audio, would have been child's play. Note to would-be 'dicks' ... don't be a dick.) 'Dick' was invited to a meeting of the BoD, I hear, and given two choices - resign, or be terminated. He's outta there, now....