At work, a 'post-mortem' is a polite way of saying, "let's see why this cluster-$&#* happened," which in turn is a HR-friendly way of saying, "who gets blamed for this latest snafu?"

It generally starts with the managers asking those involved for "timelines." That can be as simple as "this happened first, then that, then it went all pear-shaped." I wrote one up but my manager didn't like it, it didn't tell him enough of what he needed to know.

Now, to be fair, my manager isn't out to hang me with this - he needs the information so I don't get hanged, because that looks bad for him as well. I trust him to have my back.

Given that, when he said he didn't have enough, I didn't just "reach into memory" because I don't remember what I had for breakfast. I looked at my sent mail folder and started working on a spreadsheet with one column for date, another for time (to the minute) and the last column for comment / content.

If someone challenges me on why I said something happened at 9:14PM, I can pull out an email date/time-stamped accordingly and lay their fears to rest.

At any rate, this was time-consuming work. A coworker walked in my office and asked me what I was doing. Absent-mindedly, I replied, "Digging a grave. I'm not sure if it's for me or not."

Cw: "What do you mean?"

Me: "My boss needs a post-mortem on this latest release botch."

Cw: "Uh-huh. What's this about if the grave is for you or not?"

Me: "It's probably going to be for me."

Cw: "Why?"

Me: "If this turns out to be minor, then it'll look bad for me to try to pass blame onto someone else for such a small thing.

If it turns out to be big, and he's honourable, he'll step up and take his share of the lumps.

If he's not honourable, then even if I finger him, he'll just say it wasn't his fault and I'll look doubly bad."

It's odd how insightful one can be when one is utterly distracted.