Working your way up in a company is a great way to build relationships and grow in your career.
What would you do if a new CEO came in and hired his nephew for a position that you were clearly qualified for?
That is what happened to the IT manager in this story, so he ensured everything would fall apart when he left for a new job.
Check it out.
IT manager leaves business and does his own right to be forgotten!
My friend, we shall call Steve, worked for a company for over ten years as their IT manager (in charge of the whole system) he had worked his way up from lowly desktop support right to the very top.
He was also very into doing everything by the book and within the law.
No underhanded shenanigans!
The company had recently gone public (shares listed on the stock exchange) and as such needed a director of IT.
This is not going to end well for the new CEO, I can tell already.
Steve applied and was pretty much a shoe in until he was told the New CEO (the original owner who was pretty much forced to go public by the other two share holders, had taken his shares and sold them and moved on) had overruled HR and hired someone else (spoiler nepotism).
Steve shrugged and said “well at least they will take away most of my paperwork allowing me to do more work” oh how wrong he was.
When the new IT Director arrived (let’s call him Tom) he basically kicked Steve out of his office and into a desk in the main office and did nothing except walk about.
Steve found out it was the CEO’s nephew who he dotted on.
Fast forward 3 months and Steve is pretty much burned out.
The nephew had fired his two very capable assistants and replaced them with buddies who did nothing.
That is just impossible for one person.
This left Steve to look after around 400 PC’s plus associated servers and network equipment all by himself.
He was getting fed up.
All the while the Tom kept ordering him to do weird things like reinstall windows all on PC’s or order him a gaming rig for the office.
In one case go to his house to set up a home network.
The final straw came when Tom had got the CEO to cancel Steve’s bonus for “not meeting all requests made of him”.
Meanwhile his buddies (Dick and Harry) got massive bonuses and rewards for their “hard work picking up the slack.”
Steve decided at this point to start looking for a new role
It just so happened he had kept in touch with the old owner who had started a new business and after hearing of his woes had offered him a new job at his much smaller company of the same wage.
It was also a much shorter commute and he got a whole new office and nice set of benefits.
This sounds like a wonderful opportunity.
Steve of course took the offer up but also decided to plot his revenge.
Steve handed in his 3 month notice to the HR dept and began his leaving process sending emails to the Tom detailing all passwords and processes plus introducing him to suppliers and what not.
He also put on the exchange server a scheduled task to run a batch file 1 week after he left he also had one of these on the AD server and file storage servers and the backup storage servers.
What this batch file did was open power shell and run commands to delete anything he was the author of (if a file) or was last saved by him.
And also to delete any emails send to him or by him.
He also told Microsoft he was leaving this company and moving on to a new company on the specified date. (More on this later)
Leaving on good terms…as far as they know.
Steve dutifully carried out his final tasks said goodbye and as he last act a week before he left he gave HR a typed up letter stating his wish to invoke the GDPR RTBF regulations and he wants all paperwork he created deleted and the only information left for legal purposes and HR reasons (I.e pay slips etc).
On his final day he signed out handed his laptop in and left graciously.
Even buying people drinks that evening at the local pub near the company.
He was told by HR his request was completed the following week but they had to retain certain info.
HR docs and pay slips for tax reasons which was fine.
Fast forward 2 months.
Oh, I’m sure they are.
His old CEO rings him up in a panic as things are falling apart.
Updates haven’t been happening, he can’t find any details for suppliers or how to do certain roles.
He also had a huge bill from finance as all their licensing costs have gone through the roof, new staff kit is all wrong.
Steve kindly explains that he was fed up with Tom doing nothing and hiring his buddies (Dick and Harry) who also did nothing, or worse made rookie mistakes he was left to fix.
He also explained how the cheap license costs were because as Steve had a lot of qualifications from Microsoft he got discounts on products.
Now he has left they can’t receive them as he is using that privilege at his new place.
He also explained the RTBF (right to be forgotten) request saying it director had 3 months to save the info he emailed before it was deleted.
That could be illegal.
CEO then begged him to allow access to the discounts but Steve said no, he doesn’t do stuff like that.
Perhaps he should get Tom, Dick and Harry trained up?
He also said maybe instead of hiring your nephew to do a directors role maybe he should have been hired at the bottom to work his way up not fail his way down.
Steve hung up and has asked kindly not to be contacted again via email through HR
The new job is going great and Steve is enjoying it a lot from what I hear.
Lesson of the story, don’t commit nepotism or hire buddies and expect good results.
I love it when a terrible manager has to deal with the fallout of their incompetence.
Read on to see what the people in the comments had to say about this story.
It really is a dumb move.
I agree, that is a long notice.
Here is someone who says those laws wouldn’t apply.
Yes, what a dumb idea.
This person says the RTBF doesn’t work like this.
This manager was a fool and deserved to fail.
How could they pass over such an obvious choice?
If you liked that story, check out this post about an oblivious CEO who tells a web developer to “act his wage”… and it results in 30% of the workforce being laid off.