CTO with “major video call issues” spotted in Italy drinking fifth Aperol Spritz at 1pm 

A SaaS CTO who claimed to be experiencing serious video call issues has been spotted in Italy at 1 p.m. drinking his fifth Aperol Spritz and nodding thoughtfully at a plate of olives.

Markus Pint, CTO of workflow automation platform, had missed three engineering meetings after telling colleagues his camera was “completely broken,” his audio was “doing something weird,” and his internet connection was “not stable enough for leadership alignment.”

The explanation was accepted until a customer success manager noticed Flint in the background of a tourist’s LinkedIn post titled Five lessons B2B leaders can learn from slow travel.

“He was sitting in full sun, wearing linen, with what looked like no technical difficulties whatsoever,” said senior engineer Wilhelm Douche. “Unless the issue was that Zoom doesn’t support being visibly on holiday during sprint planning.”

Flint later clarified that he had not lied about connectivity.

“The Wi-Fi at the café was unstable,” he said. “So I made the responsible technical decision to remain offline and protect the team from a poor meeting experience.”

According to employees, Pint had spent the week replying to urgent messages with phrases such as “connection patchy,” “joining if possible,” and “might drop,” despite somehow maintaining perfect upload speed for several photos of the Amalfi Coast.

The engineering team became suspicious after Pint approved a pull request with the comment “looks good from here,” followed by an accidental second message reading “can we order another round?”

HR has opened an internal review into whether drinking Aperol Spritz during core working hours counts as asynchronous leadership, annual leave, or “European stakeholder research.”

Pint defended his actions, arguing that modern CTOs need space to think deeply.

“You can’t architect scalable systems from back-to-back calls,” he said. “Sometimes you need distance, and a drink that matches the company’s burn rate.”

The CEO said the matter was being handled internally, but praised Pint for demonstrating “strong remote-first adaptability.”

At press time, Pint had declined a follow-up call due to “sun glare on the screen.”