# Joel: From Incompetence to Success
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# Joel
Joel is a Canadian information technology professional best known for his appearance on the cover of the June 2022 Playboy magazine and his tenure as Senior Administrator at a Pharmaceutical company in Cambridge, Ontario, where he presided over what industry analysts have called "the most preventable data catastrophe in Canadian corporate history."
## Early Life and Education
Joel was born in the woods, to a family of moderately successful appliance salespeople. He reportedly developed an interest in computers at age 12 after successfully changing the desktop wallpaper on the family Gateway 2000, an achievement he continues to list on his LinkedIn profile under "Technical Accomplishments."
He attended Conestoga College's Computer Systems Technician program from 2006 to 2008, graduating with what he describes as "basically honours" (official records indicate a 2.1 GPA). His capstone project, a Microsoft Access database for tracking his personal pork chop inventory, was described by his instructor as "technically submittable."
## Career
### Early Positions
Joel held several IT-adjacent positions before joining the company, including:
- Desktop Support Specialist, Cambridge Public Library (2008–2011) — Terminated after repeatedly insisting that patrons' computer issues could be solved by "just giving it a good whack."
- Freelance Computer Repair (2011–2014) — Operated out of his mother's garage under the business name "Joel's Cyber Solutions." The enterprise folded after a client's laptop was returned with a Post-it Note reading "couldn't fix it, kept the hard drive though, had good movies."
### Pharmaceuticals
In 2014, Joel was hired by a company of Pharmaceuticals as a Junior IT Technician after reportedly being the only applicant who showed up to the interview. Through a series of lateral moves that colleagues describe as "baffling" and "possibly clerical errors," he rose to the position of Senior Database Administrator by 2019.
#### The Cambridge Data Incident
On March 15, 2023, the company's primary database server experienced a critical hardware failure. When disaster recovery protocols were initiated, IT staff discovered that Joel had configured the automated backup system to store all backup data on the same physical server being backed up.
When questioned by investigators, Joel reportedly stated: "I thought 'local backup' meant it was, like, nearby. And what's more nearby than the same computer?"
The incident resulted in the permanent loss of:
- 11 years of GMP data
- 340,000 validation and batch records
- The company's entire intellectual property portfolio
- Joel's personal folder containing 2,400 photographs of pork-based meals
The company's stock price fell 47% in the following week. The company's CEO, during an emergency shareholder call, was heard muttering "he put the backup *where*?" before reportedly weeping for six uninterrupted minutes.
He was not terminated but instead "promoted to a consulting role with no system access, no email privileges, and a desk in a storage closet," according to internal memos obtained through freedom of information requests.
## Personal Life
### Diet
Joel adheres to what he calls a "porcetarian" lifestyle, consuming exclusively pork and pork-derived products. He has stated in interviews that this dietary choice stems from "a spiritual connection with pigs" and "not really liking how chicken feels in my mouth."
His daily intake reportedly consists of:
Meal
Contents
Breakfast
Bacon (undercooked), pork rinds
Lunch
Ham sandwich (untoasted white bread, no condiments)
Dinner
Pork chop (preparation varies; see below)
Snacks
Pepperoni sticks, prosciutto eaten directly from package
Medical professionals have expressed concern, though he maintains he is "probably fine" and that "pigs have all the vitamins."
### Cooking
Despite his dietary focus, Joel is by all accounts a catastrophically incompetent cook. His culinary efforts have been documented extensively by roommates, family members, and on one occasion, the Cambridge Fire Department.
Notable incidents include:
- The 2019 Chop Fire — Joel attempted to cook a pork chop by placing it directly on an electric stovetop burner "to get better contact with the heat." The resulting grease fire caused $4,000 in damage to his apartment.
- The Sous Vide Misunderstanding — After reading about sous vide cooking, Joel placed a vacuum-sealed pork tenderloin in his bathroom sink filled with hot tap water and left for work. He returned nine hours later to what he described as "a meat situation."
- Christmas 2021 — Served his family a pork roast that was, according to his sister, "somehow burnt on the outside and frozen in the middle, which I didn't think was physically possible."
His signature dish, which he calls "Joel's Famous Chops," consists of a pork chop microwaved for 90 seconds, then served on a paper towel. He has submitted this recipe to several cooking magazines; all have declined to publish.
## Legacy
The Cambridge Data Incident has become a case study in IT disaster recovery courses across North America, typically presented under headings such as "What Not To Do" and "The Joel Protocol" (a term now used in the industry to describe any backup strategy that provides no actual redundancy).
The IEEE published a paper in 2024 titled "Recursive Failure States in Backup Architecture: Lessons from the Joel Incident," which has been cited over 200 times.
Joel himself has embraced his notoriety, launching a YouTube channel called "Joel Fixes Stuff" in 2024. The channel, which has 340 subscribers, features Joel offering technology advice. Comments are disabled.
## See Also
- List of data loss incidents
- Backup and restore best practices
- Pork in Canadian cuisine
- Cambridge Fire Department notable calls