Thought the CEO was asking me for a list of People of Color in our office and accidentally got two white guys yelled at

Happened yesterday, wrote all of this right afterwards and am posting it today.

I just started a part time, after school internship at a big tech company in my city. Today, a certain former president was expected to surrender to authorities pretty close by and most of the people in my office decided to work from home since we are expecting protesters. But not me. So I walked in and it was pretty much just me and the friggin CEO of the company.

Even though I felt super awkward, it was really cool to get some face time with him. We chatted for a bit then he told me he would try to keep me busy since my actual boss was, in his words, “cowering at home unlike us men.”

The first thing he asked me to do was get him the “POC” on a project one of our teams was working on. He got a call and left to his office before I could ask him follow ups, which was unfortunate because if I had been able to ask for clarification, well, I wouldn’t be posting here.

A big part of my training has been DEI, and just based on my first few days, it seems like the company is making a genuine effort to be better in that regard. So I understood the CEO to have meant that he wanted a list of all the people of color working on that project.

Anxious to not waste any time and most of all to prove myself, I looked up all the people from the team on Microsoft Outlook. There were only seven of them and they all seemed to be white, except two men with tanned skin. I couldn’t tell if they were white or not, but after looking up their last names and seeing that they were South African, I decided these were the guys in question.

I brought their names on a post it note to the CEO. He looked kind of surprised and said “they have two points of contact? Redundant, but okay.” I froze up and probably turned red as a beet, but the CEO paid it no heed and asked me to come in his office and sit in on a Teams call with him and the two guys I just named to him. I just went with it, because I didn’t feel like I could explain my way out of it.

He cold called the two guys and when I saw them pop up on the screen I saw they were 100% just White South African men. At that point I was actually about to throw up, knowing my idiotic (and ethnically insensitive) mistake was about to come out in front of three higher level employees and I would have no defense except “dur I’m a high school age dunce”.

But somehow, that moment never came.

The CEO just started yelling at them without letting them even get a single word in. He accosted them for terrible communication and giving unrealistic deadlines to the corporate leadership. And after five minutes of yelling, one of the guys tried to apologize and the CEO just hung up on him. He winked at me and said, in slightly kinder words, that if I keep showing up on days when everyone else is staying at home, one day I would get to be the one yelling at subordinates.

I guess it’s good that the CEO likes me and my error was never revealed. But I’m kind of terrified that it will come out, and I definitely feel bad for the two guys.

TL;DR CEO wanted points of contacts, I thought he wanted people of color, I gave him the names of two South Africans who he proceeded to chew out