Isn’t it insane how some companies don’t value their assets?

This guy shares how he was wrongfully fired from work but later helped his manager when he needed it.

Check out the full story.

Don’t fire your senior system operator then

This was very long ago, my first job back in IT after a long foray into other fields.

I was Senior System Operator for an ISP, which means 100% technical lead for everything but the boss (we were the first two employees) didn’t want to call me System Administrator for some reason (probably because he thought I’d bail on him with that on my resume’).

This is where it gets weird…

There are many stories I can tell but today we’re starting at the end; the week I was fired.

All the documentation was stored in a subdirectory in my home directory, with a symlink in the Samba share so everybody could read it.

By this point I had two junior sysops I was supervising, as well as a couple of PC support folks (we also built PCs and supported small networks etc.) who were semi-trained to fill in for phone support for the ISP etc.

The reasons I was fired weren’t special, the manager was a crook and I wouldn’t play ball, ratted him out to customers etc.

What matters is the fact of it; I got fired.

UH OH…

While I was being fired, one of the junior sysops, I’ll call him Bob, made a phone call and by the time I got home I had a job offer waiting on my answering machine. (Cellphones weren’t universal back then.)

That very day, the manager logged in and saw the documentation in my home directory, and assumed I’d made a copy of it, so he deleted it all. This would of course become important later.

Two days later, somebody accidentally fired off an rm -rf in /home on the server that contained customer web pages. They’d wiped out about 1/3rd of the customers before they realized what was going on and stopped it.

I was home enjoying my brief vacation (new job had made me an offer and I hadn’t accepted yet, was still making my own phone calls), when the ISP manager called me:

me: Hello?

It gets intense…

manager: Hey, uh, this is Manager, I’m, uh, sorry to bother you, but, uh, how do we recover a backup?

me: You don’t fire your senior system operator. click

Brief pause to laugh it off, then I log onto ICQ and hit up Bob.

me: Bob, you alone?

Bob: Yep.

me: WTH dude? Manager just called me.

That’s INSANE!

Bob: Somebody wiped half the customer directories, and we can’t figure out how to restore a backup.

me: Docs are on the Samba share, it’s step by step.

Bob: The Samba share is empty. There’s nothing there.

me: WHAT? There’s a whole pile of docs, marked read-only to the Samba user, there’s no way to delete them without going into my home directory and doing it as root. Wait, look in my home dir.

Bob: Yeah, it’s not there; but now that you say that, Manager said something about erasing a copy of the docs in your home dir.

Finally the cherry on top!

me: LOL OH he wiped all your docs man. OK, here’s how to be the hero. Do not tell anybody I gave you this, this is thanks for the call to New Employer. Instructions to restore the document that contains the backup restoration procedure. That command will pull the backup docs back, then you can follow them to restore anything else you need. Wait an hour and then be the hero.

Bob: Will do, thanks man. Enjoy the new job.

I didn’t, but that’s a story for another time.

GEEZ! This sounds satisfying!

Let’s find out what folks on Reddit think about this one.

This user knows they wouldn’t have helped for free…

This user knows this guy is a good employee!

This user shares a story from their workplace!

This user shares an alternative solution for this issue.

That’s right! This user is happy that this guy helped Bob.

Somebody’s playing the nice guy here!

If you liked that post, check out this post about a woman who tracked down a contractor who tried to vanish without a trace.