Some workers are their own worst enemy.

It makes justice easier, but it’s baffling that people do bad things without even considering the consequences.

Read on to see this boss get what he deserved.

Sort of…

Boss applies policy, employee gets mad, CEO rips employee a new one.

Back in the early 2000s I was working for a local council in New Zealand.

If you’re not aware, NZ has a central government and a series of local areas around cities or rural boundaries, each run by an elected Mayor and Council.

The day-to-day business is done by employees in a typical business structure.

It’s a tricky system.

One of the things about this is that all computer systems are regarded as being “owned” by the council, and kinda-sorta by the populace.

It a member of the public wants to see what’s on the computers, they can make a request under the Official Information Act, and see pretty much anything, except private data.

(Private data being defined by the Privacy Act as basically names, addresses, birth dates, phone numbers, etc.)

Also working in the council offices was a small business, that had an exclusive contract with the council.

This group handled the more physical aspects of the council systems: maintenance of roads, sewer and water systems, etc.

If the council said “we need a new pipe there,” this small business made it happen.

Thing is, the Small Business leased (this is important) their computers from the council.

The small I.T. team (three people, including me) built and supplied those machines.

We owned the software that was on them, and they were connected to the internal council network.

This meant they were subject to the same local govt and council policies as the rest of us.

They are about to get a helpful tool.

Periodically, we in I.T. would clean out large files.

(Early 2000s, when storage was expensive, and we were limited due to budget, etc.)

The staff were fully aware of this and knew to keep personal files to a minimum.

If we, during a purge, found large personal files, we could delete them at our discretion.

During this time we found some… videos… on an SB employee’s machine.

It was inappropriate, and not the nice kind of inappropriate either.

Because this violated council policy in oh-so-many ways, we deleted it quietly.

The employee in question complained, claiming we had removed “personal” files.

(I never saw the videos, happily, but my understanding is that he wasn’t in them. They were stuff he had downloaded.)

Watch him make his own bed.

We pointed at the policy. He went to the CEO and complained.

The CEO came to us.

My boss had figured this might happen and showed the CEO one of the videos.

It was on the backups, just in case we deleted something we shouldn’t and had to restore it. (We were good enough at our jobs that we never had to do that, but better safe than sorry.)

I wasn’t there when it happened, but by all accounts the CEO hauled the employee and the employee’s boss (boss of the SB) to an out-of-hearing location and ripped them a new one.

The only reason the employee wasn’t fired was because he technically worked for the SB, and not the council.

Here is what folks are saying.

Interesting. Good to know.

The satire writes itself.

He doesn’t sound like he’s on the up and up, does he?

If Forensic Files has taught me anything, it’s that most criminals know nothing about computers or servers.

It’s a security issue, on top of everything else.

Too bad he couldn’t be fired.

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.