Kathy McCabe - "Honesty Goes to the Core of my Very Being"

"Honesty goes to the core of my very being."
Kathy McCabe 6 June 2008

During mediation with Kathy, she came out with this line about three times. Kathy must think that the more times you repeat something, the truer it becomes.

The mediator informed Kathy and me in advance of the meeting, that we were to prepare and read out a statement to each other, and then we were to begin asking questions of each other.

Kathy read out her statement. It was full of nonsense about me. I read out my statement. Kathy didn't like it because I had mentioned that she had been dishonest with me. Kathy flipped her lid. She made one almighty fuss. She demanded that I withdraw my accusation of dishonesty. I couldn't. The best I could say was to change it to "Sometimes you have been dishonest with me." She still didn't like it.

Then when it came time for me to ask questions, Kathy said she wasn't going to answer any of my questions, and that if I even asked her a question, she would walk out of the mediation. I offered to wait until we were alone to ask questions, because I thought she was maybe embarrassed to answer my questions in the presence of her friend, Colin Sinclair, who she had brought along for support. But she wasn't going to answer my questions any time or anywhere.

At his interview for the grievance process, Colin said Kathy did answer my questions. Well, in that case, she won't mind answering them again at the tribunal.

I intend to show you at least one example of Kathy's dishonesty on here. It is a very special example, because it also shows Kathy's disrespect for me, even though I was one of the oldest and most senior members of the team. She wanted to show off to the team just how disrespectful she was of me. I was too stupid to deserve respect. That was the image she wanted the team to have of me. She was encouraging them to be disrespectful too. Is it any wonder that Eileen MacDonald would then ignore any advice I gave her? Eileen was at the opposite end of the spectrum from me. Kathy respected her when she didn't even have the basic knowledge for her job. Yet Eileen would arrogantly complain about my performance and integrity. Not only had I explained to Eileen that she was wrong, but I had explained to Kathy that Eileen was wrong. But two years later, Eileen was still making the same mistakes. Mistakes that even a student programmer would think were absurd.

In her grievance document, Kathy talks about the mediation process: "Fundamental problem is that Allan said I was dishonest. I stated that questioning my honesty and integrity was a serious personal attack and that if this was the basis from which he was working then I could not see how we could establish a proper working relationship and that we would have to recognise that mediation had failed. Allan's interpretation of this was that I was breaking the mediation process. He had to be told several times by Liz, and I had to repeat my words, but he did not accept the premise. I stated that he needed to moderate the statement. He moderated it to a statement that I was sometimes dishonest. After a 5 min timeout I stated that I acknowledged that he had made a slight moderation but that this still wasn't enough. This was ignored.

It's interesting that this particular document was a document she wrote for herself originally two days after the mediation. Yet she couldn't even bring herself to tell the truth to herself. Fascinating!

She then says "On reflection this was the most difficult and deeply unpleasant experience of my working life. I am not convinced that Allan is prepared to move forward, but rather he will still want to go through every detail of the grievance point by point. I could do this but am not convinced that Allan would accept my explanations. I believe that his views are so deeply entrenched that this is the only view he will accept. I believe that the mediator found his doggedness rather frustrating and she had to pull him up on more than one occasion because his interjections were pejorative and unhelpful, or both."

Basically, she is admitting that she refused to answer my questions. But she puts her own spin on the actual events.

In May 2009, I had my appraisal with Kathy. I told her that I wanted to attend the Oracle conference which is held annually at the end of the year. It's a conference that is attended predominately by Database Administrators (DBAs) like myself. When I first became DBA, Kathy said I would attend the conference every year. But she changed her mind. Instead she used the staff development fund mainly for her friends who were mostly all women. So, for about six years on the trot, she wouldn't let me go. That is bullying as well as sex discrimination. At my appraisal she was very dismissive of my request. She abruptly said "Noted." I reminded her that I hadn't attended for several years. Again, she abruptly said "Noted." In fact she put exactly that on the appraisal form. "Noted."

I talked to several colleagues about his later on. Everybody knew that Kathy had been bullying me by preventing me from attending that conference. They all said that she was bound to let me attend that year. I said I got the feeling she wasn't going to let me go just from her attitude at my appraisal.

Sure enough, I wasn't selected to attend the conference. Kathy had again chosen others to attend conferences, though. Eric and Jackie wrote to the team to inform us that they would be out of the office to attend a conference. I emailed Jackie and copied to the team. I said I wouldn't be out of the office because I hadn't been chosen again. I jokingly asked her what the secret was to making a successful request because each year my request was rejected.

Kathy replied to me and the team pointing out that she is not a mind reader, and that if I wanted to attend a conference, I should have asked. Then she added that I hadn't asked to attend that year or any previous year.

That's what I mean when I say that Kathy is likely to come out with any stupid lie on the spur of the moment. Honesty wasn't at the core of her very being when she sent that email. Kathy had shown her true colours. And this was less than a year after Mark Toole told her that criticism was to be delivered privately and should be evidence based.

I calmly replied to Kathy's email saying that it was not appropriate language and that it was an attempt to publicly humiliate me. I told her that I still had copies of some of my written requests.

She had nowhere to go. She had basically called me a liar publicly. She had tried to publicly humiliate me by suggesting that I was stupid to think that she could read minds. And to top it off, she was lying to the whole team, and I could prove it.

It didn't end there though. It was still simmering away in her head. She came up with a plan to clear her from her own stupidity. Days later, I received an email from her inviting me to meet with her to talk about the appropriate way to request attendance at a conference. At first I didn't understand what she was meaning. It didn't make sense. Then it suddenly hit me. The reason she was inviting me to meet with her was because it made her email visible to team members who regularly looked at her calendar. It was devious bullying. She wanted to give the impression to colleagues, that although I had requested attendance, I had used an inappropriate method. She was trying to get herself off the hook.

I wrote to her and asked her to remove the email from public display. I quoted part of the university's bullying policy to her. She briefly made it private, and then she made it public again.

Eventually, Mark Toole had to tell her to remove the email from public display. He also told her to rephrase her email to make the meeting sound as though it had a more positive purpose. She wrote again and said that the meeting was to find a better procedure for requesting attendance at conferences.

There was no changing Kathy. And now she has got herself in knots.

And, of course, Eileen Schofield didn't consider any of this to be bullying behaviour. Apparently every allegation I made was rejected, yet most of Kathy's vexatious allegations were upheld. Funny that! Is it any wonder that Eileen Schofield receives death threats?

Then that muppet, Kevin Clarke said he saw no flaw in the process.

Karen Stark - An Addiction to Fraud

I an earlier post, I spoke of the fraudulent document that Stirling Univesity gave to the Employment Tribunal to try to mislead them into thinking that all of my grievances against Kathy McCabe were thoroughly investigated. It would have been useful if Karen Stark and Eileen Schofield had produced this document at the time the alleged investigations took place. Not only would it have been useful; it would surely have been natural. Eileen is the university's Deputy Secretary on grade 10. She probably earns around £80,000 per year. Karen is on Grade 8, earning £44,000. This is not a pair of inexperienced juniors fresh from school. Any investigation would surely have been carefully planned and executed, and the findings would have been meticulously recorded BEFORE the outcome was decided. That's how I think most people would expect a proper investigation of their concerns to be carried out. Many of my complaints were of being bullied over several years, and the university promises that such complaints will be taken 'extremely seriously', so you would imagine there would be considerable evidence of this. Some of my complaints were of sex discrimination, and just days before I lodged my grievance, the Principal had written to every member of staff, including Eileen and Karen, emphasising how Stirling University was committed to diversity, and ensuring staff could work free from discrimination and victimisation. Karen even saw and acknowledged the protected disclosure I made to the Principal, in which I describe how senior management and HR had failed in its duty of care by allowing Kathy to continue bullying me to the serious detriment of my health.

In theory, my protected disclosure to the Principal should have raised alarm bells. The Principal should have been concerned that the university's committment, that she had just told us all about, didn't really exist, and that possibly HR and senior management had fooled her into thinking that there ever was such a committment. The question I feel the Principal should answer under oath is "Was she just innocently incompetent, or was she lying when she wrote to every single member of her staff?" I don't know if there is a third option, but she should have the opportunity to explain. I have asked for Christine Hallett to appear at the tribunal for cross examination, but the uni has objected to this. I feel that Christine should have the opportunity to clear her name, if she wants to. Christine is well known for claiming expenses, and I'm pretty sure the tribunal would fully refund any reasonable expenses she may incur in attending.

Obviously, if she was to tell the tribunal that she didn't lie to every single member of staff while being paid £250,000 a year to do so, then I would need her to explain her response to my protected disclosure. Her 'committment' seemed to have somewhat fallen short of what she had described to us all just days earlier. Could she have forgotten so quickly?

Much of what I said in my protected disclosure referred to meetings that took place with Karen Stark attending as the note taker. Most notable during these meetings was the behaviour of one Kathy McCabe. This was the Kathy that my team rarely got to see. It was the same Kathy who behaved in the same way during mediation. She acted like a spoilt little girl accused of stealing and eating all of the chocolate biscuits; screaming that it wasn't her, and blaming her innocent little brother, while the chocolate on her face and on her pretty dress told a different story. During mediation, she defiantly refused to answer any questions; she even left the room in a tantrum! At the time I felt embarrassed for Colin Sinclair; this was his friend who was behaving like a child. Ruth and I had genuinely believed him when he said he had always known her to be honest. We could never have anticipated that he would later make a statement saying that Kathy had answered my questions. Colin and Kathy are both IT managers at the uni. Graham Millar is another. All three are corrupt. David Gardiner is another IT manager at the uni. He is also close friends with Kathy and Colin. To my knowledge, he has played no part in this sham. However, he did stop speaking to me after I lodged my grievance against Kathy. The reason I mention David is because he came over to me and a friend I was with in a pub in Stirling one night, and threatened me; not physically, but with his powers of corruption. He had jumped to the wrong conclusion about me and my friend. He later apologised, blaming alcohol, but the damage was done. And he was so proud of his ability and willingness to abuse his powers that he wanted my friend to hear all about how he could ruin my career. The little shit was trying to scare me and embarrass me. He is an embarrassment to himself. I spent much of another evening with him once. Once again he was the worse for drink, and he described his hatred for his ex-wife's boyfriend, and what he planned to do if the opportunity arose. Many people will recognise David as a friendly, jovial bloke. I think it's a mask, and alcohol removes the mask to reveal the true David. With David, we probably wouldn't need lie detector tests; just alcohol!

So that's four IT managers as well as their boss, Mark Toole and former boss, Peter Kemp. Will the honest IT manager please stand up.

Back to Karen Stark, the note taker! Being involved with grievance and disciplinary procedures, I am always amazed at the accuracy of the notes taken by the note takers. The note taker is generally someone who is drawn from HR who has no prior involvement or emotional investment in the proceedings. The notes are not perfect by any means; that would be impossible without an audio recording device, but I'm genuinely surprised how accurate they are, given how much is said, the speed with which it is said, and that the topic being discussed may include terms the note taker may never have heard before. No meeting was ever stopped in order for the note taker to ask for something to be repeated, or to ask for time to catch up. It is a skill I truly wish I had. There might be little bits that are slightly wrong, but you can always tell that it was a genuine attempt to record what was said. The note taker then takes their handwritten notes, types them up, and files away both copies in electronic format. It's almost bulletproof.

There is but one exception to this, and that is when the note taker is Karen Stark. Karen was the note taker at a meeting attended by Mark Toole, Kathy, Lynn McDonald and my union representative, Dave Edgar. For most of the meeting, Kathy attacked me with malicious criticism. It was an act of desperation because at a previous meeting, Mark had told her that criticism should be delivered privately and it should be evidence based. She had agreed to that, but I could see that she was embarrassed at having basically been told by Mark that she was behaving like a bully. She was out for revenge, and that meant increasing the bullying. It was as if she had totally lost all sense of reason. The things she was criticising me about were things that any normal manager would have thanked me for. Much of this absurd criticism, and my response to it did not appear in Karen's notes.

I pointed out to Kathy that her arms were folded, and that she had told me she had complained to the uni that I had my arms folded during a meeting, and she thinks it's aggressive. She quickly unfolded her arms and said that she hadn't noticed. This didn't appear in Karen's notes.

I highlighted how she treats me differently from other team members, because when I had written to her saying that a colleague had physically assaulted me, she din't even reply. She then amazingly claimed that I had never told her of the assault. I reminded her that I had told her in an email. She denied it, just as she had denied receiving other emails from me. I offered to go and fetch the email, and asked her in advance what she would say once I showed it to her. This was because when I had shown her another email that she insisted she never received, she made up some stupid excuse about it. Dave asked her if she had known about the assault. She admitted that she had known. Dave asked her what she did about it. She said she didn't do anything about it. Dave asked her why she took no action, and she said it was because she wasn't present at the time of the assault.

Karen's notes do not refer to the fact that my manager thought that arm folding, which every single member of the team did, is so aggressive that it warranted a written complaint to the uni, while physical assault warranted no action whatsoever.

This is just a small sample of what Karen's notes do not include. This is particularly important because my grievance against Kathy included her behaviour at these meetings. But when Karen and Eileen came to investigate this complaint, the thorough investigation that I was promised turned out to be a complete sham. None of the witnesses were interviewed. There was a strange rule applied about witnesses. In order for a witness to be interviewed, their name had to appear in the documents that Kathy and I had lodged. But all of the attendees at those meetings were named in the documents, and so could have been interviewed anyway. So they were deliberately not interviewed. The entire investigation for my complaint consisted of Karen looking at her notes. Her notes didn't include anything worthy of complaint, so my complaint was rejected.

Karen's notes may originally have been accurate, but I didn't get to see them until after the grievance process. It is possible that she tampered with the notes to remove anything that was too incriminating for Kathy. I asked Karen for her handwritten version of the notes, but she said she destroyed them after she typed them up. all of the other note takers keep both versions.

Karen will have some explaining to do at the tribunal, about how these notes are so inaccurate, and why she destroyed her handwritten notes, and why the witnesses were not interviewed. This is in addition to her fraudulent investigation details document. She has produced a fraudulent document which, in turn, refers to another fraudulent document that she produced.

This amount and degree of fraud could mean a spell in the slammer for Karen, and I think she fully deserves it. Karen was already aware that her behaviour was damaging my health.

It will be interesting to see if Karen insists her notes are accurate, and that my account of these meetings that were attended by several witnesses, is false. Or will she once again claim that it was just a mistake? God knows where she is going with this, but she certainly has acquired a taste for fraud.

After the grievance decision was announced, Kevin Clarke described Karen as "highly professional". This raises very serious concerns about the University Secretary's judgement. Will he still be saying that when she's on her way to jail? Was Karen working to his instructions? Why is she still in her job where she could be doing this to more and more innocent employees? Is nobody at the uni calling for an investigation into her behaviour?

Regarding Karen's fraud, there could even be more. Watch this space...

Colin Sinclair - A great disappointment!

I first got to know Colin through playing football. We were team mates in the intramural 6-a-side competition for a few years. He also took part in the IS mile races that I organised every couple of months. I'd met his wife and kids at Kathy McCabe's home a couple of times. The Sinclairs and the McCabes are close friends and neighbours. Colin was someone that everybody immediately warmed to. He was a devout family man with a great sense of humour. Like Kathy, he also managed a team in Information Services. I dated a woman from his team for a few months, and she thought the world of him. Ruth had met Colin a couple of times at social events, and she too took a shine to him.

It was a great disappointment to discover that Colin is a liar.

In 2008, Kathy and I attended mediation. Colin attended in support of Kathy, and Ruth attended to provide support for me. The mediator had instructed us to prepare a statement that we were to read to each other, followed by questions we were to ask each other. We both read our statements. In my statement I mentioned that Kathy had been dishonest with me at work. She didn't like that. She demanded that I withdraw it. I wouldn't. I asked her if she would like examples of her dishonesty. She didn't. She went on and on and on about how honest she was. She said that honesty went to the core of her very being. Colin chipped in and said that Kathy was one of the most honest people he had ever known. I genuinely believed that he meant it.

The mediator instructed us to start asking questions. Kathy refused to ask questions, and she refused to allow me to ask questions. She said that if I asked any questions, she would leave the mediation. She could tell from my statement that she was going to have to face some difficult questions.

Colin was interviewed as part of the grievance investigation. He was asked if Kathy answered my questions, and he said she did. At the end of his interview he falsely states that whenever he asked me for help, I would tell him I was too busy. His library computer system was running at snail pace for a while. He had been in regular contact with the suppliers who were contracted to fix such problems, but they didn't fix it. When he told me about it, I fixed it right away in my own time, even though it wasn't my job to do so.

You can see from the correspondence between the mediator and me just three weeks after the mediation that Kathy neither asked nor answered questions. Colin's statement is below. There's also an email from his colleague thanking me for fixing his system just two days before mediation.

Digital Recordings

I have sent Stirling University's lawyers sound recordings that support my assertion that a number of colleagues have told porky pies.

One of the recordings includes a conversation I had with Selina Gibb. One contains a discussion that includes David Black. One includes a conversation I had with Una Forsyth. One includes a conversation with Kathy McCabe.

I have written transcripts of the recordings, and the university accepts that they are accurate. They do not, however, accept that the voices belong to the people I say they belong to. They say that they do not want the individuals concerned to hear them in order to confirm that it is them. This makes it more likely that I will have to call them as witnesses to be cross examined.