CHAPTER 1The Time I Ruined Easter
I’ve had better Sundays.
It was Easter, April 16, 2017. I had just finished a homemade dinner with my husband. It was time to chill and finally enjoy a few hours of downtime, compliments of the latest binge-worthy craze on Netflix. Little did I know, I was about to star in my own real-life drama that was much more cringe-worthy instead.
My cell lit up and I looked down at the display. It was a text from Chatelle, our chief human resources officer (CHRO). Chatelle and I were close. We had just teamed up to help McAfee’s spinout from Intel as one of the world’s largest independent cybersecurity companies 12 days prior. Seeing a text from her on Easter wasn’t unusual, assuming it was the type of well-wishing that happens between friends on a holiday. This was not that type of text.
- You need to check out our social media page. It’s bad.
I immediately felt my blood pressure surge as I opened McAfee’s company page on a very prominent social media platform, the name of which I have redacted from this true story. I was horrified.
Someone had deliberately defaced the social profile of our newly minted, 12-day-old company with the most obscene and offensive language directed at nearly every walk of life. This would be bad for any company. But let me try to express how desperately bad this was for us.
The offensive epithets were in stark contradiction to everything our company represented. We had just relaunched our brand with a new tagline, “Together ...
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