The Lies

Despite having a high level of intelligence, Kathy McCabe is a terrible and compulsive liar. She automatically lies under very little pressure. For example, rather than admit to making a mistake, she becomes defensive, and immediately lies to cover it up.

Kathy had arranged SQLServer training, from an external training company, for David Black and me. In court, she claimed that this was due to David and me having pressed her for this training because of the increasing number of SQLServer databases in the uni. That was the first lie, because she arranged it herself out of the blue. Indeed I doubt if David would have been aware of any such databases at that time.

David and I were to arrange when we were to attend the training. Shortly after Kathy told us about it, we learned that we had been downgraded by the role evaluation process. Then I went off work sick with stress for five weeks, and when I returned, I was still suffering from stress, and to attend training would have been pointless, as I wouldn't have been able to concentrate. I planned to wait until the stress had reduced before I attended the training.

Then in November 2008, Kathy informed David and me that the training vouchers she had bought for us were due to expire within a month. Neither of us could manage to attend within that time, so Kathy tried to give the vouchers to other team members for a different use, but in the end the vouchers expired before anyone could use them.

At her grievance interview, Kathy lied and said that she had told David and me several times that the vouchers had a deadline by which they had to be used, when in fact she hadn't told us about the existence of vouchers at all until a month before they were due to expire.

This was a lie that David didn't know Kathy had made up, so when I asked him about it at the tribunal hearing, he saw no reason not to tell the truth. I then showed him Kathy's statement from her grievance hearing. I suspect that if he'd known in advance that Kathy had lied, he would have covered for her. Later, Kathy repeated her lies under oath.


Peter Kemp, just as I strongly suspected, lied to me after I submitted a 25 page informal grievance against Kathy McCabe in which I give considerable detail about her behaviour.

In 2008, I wrote to him complaining that Kathy had written to the entire team to arrange for them to decide on an issue relating to database security which was my responsibility as Database Administrator. She did this to undermine me because Eileen MacDonald repeatedly refused to work within the agreed security procedures. Peter replied claiming that he had told Kathy to arrange this. At the hearing, Kathy confirmed that she did this on her own initiative.

Stirling University claims that they take complaints of bullying "extremely seriously". The should rewrite their documents to read "When you complain of bullying, senior management will lie to you in order to try to cover up the bullying. Then we will accuse you of being the bully before we sack you without any investigation."


As part of the role evaluation process, Kathy McCabe had to check and sign the role description for each role in her team. One of the roles, System Assistant, was occupied by three women. The description states that it takes five years to gain the Oracle skills required for the role. That is completely false, and represents serious fraud. I would estimate that it would take less than a month for an employee to gain the Oracle skills required for the work that they carry out. Indeed, as a student on my placement year, I had learned those skills to a much higher level within a month; as did the students before and after me. Kathy confirmed that, with no prior Oracle knowledge, she designed and wrote a full application within her first six months at the university. The Oracle skills for writing an application require far more than required by a System Assistant.

In addition, Selina Gibb had occupied the role for more than five years with absolutely no Oracle skills. So on that basis, every employee at the university could legitimately claim that it takes five years to gain the Oracle skills required for their role; including Gardeners, Cleaners, and the Principal.

One of Mark Toole's alleged reasons for dismissing me was that I didn't agree with the university's database security policy. This was another extraordinary reason, because I definitely agreed with the university's database policy; indeed it was me who introduced it, in my capacity of Database Administrator. However, according to Mark, I didn't even know what the security policy was. Apparently he knows of a policy that existed before he joined the university that gave permission for all and sundry to connect to databases as the base table owner, despite the only policy that I was aware of, and the one that I was required to confirm to external auditors that we were working to. It would appear that Mark expected me to lie to the auditors by confirming that the university was complying with the real policy while, in reality, we were complying with his imaginary policy.

Mark Toole, just like his predecessor, Peter Kemp, is full of shit. Lying comes too easily him, and that's how he has ended up with himself in knots. It appears that he now agrees with the security policy I introduced, because employees no longer have access to the passwords for base table owners, and they haven't had access to them since before I was sacked. So if my policy was so wrong, why hasn't he changed it?

The reason he is in knots is because, just like Peter Kemp, he is unwilling to deal with the real problem; Eileen MacDonald, who was the person who actually didn't agree with the real policy, and picked and chose what policies she would work to.





One of the many lies told by Eileen MacDonald under oath was that Kathy McCabe had asked me to produce regular reports that would list examples of data errors in the Student Records database so that staff  in the relevant departments could use it to correct the bad data. Not only was this a lie, but it also clearly demonstrates how evil Eileen MacDonald really is.

I had been very much in favour of producing reports of bad data because, as a conscientious Database Administrator, I wanted a clean database for my users. Although I didn't know it at the time, it seems that Eileen had been instrumental in causing that data to become bad in the first place by allowing large numbers of staff to insert data into the Student Records system by a quick method, which although might have seemed a fantastic idea to those staff, was actually a horrendously bad idea, and one that, in any normal organisation, a Database Administrator  responsible for the integrity of the data, would have been consulted upon before allowing non validated data to enter the database. 

Eileen had deliberately hidden this horrendously bad idea from me, because when Jackie O'Neil alerted me to it, she challenged Jackie by asking her "Why did you have to go and tell him?"

Having made herself the darling of the users by allowing them to insert data so much more quickly, Eileen had probably been making me out as the person responsible for allowing bad data into the database, even though I had known nothing about it.

I met with Eileen and Kathy. I strongly recommended that we stop allowing further bad data to enter the database. It's hardly a good reason to have shit in your database just because you can enter that shit very quickly. You don't see many systems being advertised on the basis that that they allow shit to be entered very quickly into their database. There's a term that I'm sure most people are aware of: "Garbage in, garbage out!" What that means is that if you allow shit or garbage into your database, then any decisions based on that data will be shit or garbage too. One of the most important reasons for having data in a database is to allow you to make decisions based on that data. In that respect, University of Stirling is a wholly unprofessional organisation.

At that meeting, I also strongly recommended that we take steps to clean up that data, but they both rejected my recommendation. I suspect it was because the users may have wondered why Eileen had allowed the quick means of entering bad data when she should have known that it was going to take a lot of time to clean it up to make it useful.

There are witnesses to the fact that I was strongly in favour of producing regular reports on bad data. I had discussed it with David Black and Paul Scott who both agreed with me. However, the best witness of all is Lynn McDonald who agreed with me so strongly that she encouraged Kathy to allow me to do it. Kathy refused. She thought it would seem like we were telling the users that they had made mistakes.

Lynn McDonald then provided support to Eileen after I lodged a grievance against her. She may not, at that time, have known what a liar Eileen is, but she certainly knows now.

Nobody in their wildest dreams could ever have imagined that Lynn McDonald would ever be a bully or a supporter of bullies. It just wasn't in her make-up. In a way, Lynn is even more disappointing than the more direct bullies. To stand by and watch what has happened to me and do nothing is possibly worse than the direct bullies. It is the bystanders who do nothing, or who unwittingly or deliberately support the bullies that ensure bullying continues. They are no better than the bullies. They conform to a bullying and scapegoating culture.



Another lie, that I even thought might have been true at the tribunal, came from Eric Hall. He stated that Selina Gibb had informed him about her (completely false) account of me going wild and red and spitting on her desk in anger, etc.  He added that he was so concerned that he informed Kathy McCabe about it. Well, Kathy denied several times that Eric had ever told her anything about Selina saying this. I now believe Eric had made this up to support Selina. Pathetic! Eric would say anything to help him keep his job.





To be continued...