The Severance Package Was Signed, then the Ledgers Locked Up. The Insane Story of an Accountant Who Left His Old Bosses in a Functional Blackout.
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A good manager knows when to leave well enough alone.
That’s what this accountant thought after spending years helping keep a small company’s accounting department running smoothly. Along with the regular job, plenty of extra responsibilities slowly landed on the desk, and nobody complained because everything kept working.
Then the company fired the longtime manager and replaced him with someone who wanted to control every little detail. Before long, the new boss ordered the accountant to stop handling anything that wasn’t part of the official job description.
At first, the employee did exactly that. But then the department slowly started falling apart as more and more important work stopped getting done.
Things only got worse after the company laid the accountant off. And that’s when the new manager discovered the unfinished job manual sitting on the network, but there was one big problem.
Read on to see what happened next.
Terrible manager collapses an entire department
I worked in the accounting department at a small business. My boss, Gary, was great and gave us lots of autonomy to get everything done.
It was a small business, and over the years, as is common in small businesses, I picked up a number of duties that weren’t strictly in my job description but were pretty important. We also had a number of processes that were not well documented, but we were understaffed and not able to make any real changes.
Things overall were pretty good, though, and our work flowed well, and everyone was happy.
Unfortunately, he didn’t think the company would keep him much longer.
Not everyone, though.
Gary’s boss, Carl, had recently taken over as president of the company and wanted to slash costs. Gary was one of the highest-paid employees, and Carl tried to get him to take a pay cut or reduce his hours. When Gary refused, Carl fired him and shortly replaced him with Matt, who was much less experienced and much less qualified.
Around this time, I used my leverage with Carl to get a solid raise. I knew Carl would be looking to replace me soon, just like he did Gary, but I was too essential to lose without Gary there.
I figured I had about six months, which lined up with when I was planning to move out of state anyway.
In his downtime, he tried to create a manual for his coworkers.
So, knowing that when I did leave, my coworkers would be stuck picking up the slack from my job—particularly all the ancillary stuff I had picked up that was not documented at all—I started writing a detailed manual for my own job whenever I had time here and there.
I didn’t really care for Matt or Carl, but I figured it would save my coworkers a lot of stress.
Matt was a poor accountant and an even worse manager. He was an awful micromanager with no concept of the “bigger picture.” Pretty quickly, he noticed that I was spending time doing all these other duties that weren’t in my job description. He told me I was only to work on projects he assigned me directly.
I tried to point out all the things that would not get done if I stopped doing them. He was having none of it and told me not to worry about it, as it wasn’t my job. Sure thing, boss!
Then, he stopped doing everything for the most part.
I stopped doing anything except what he told me to do. And the department started falling apart.
Customer emails went unanswered, software stopped working with no one to support it, files weren’t organized, etc. I normally took care of these and a hundred other things, but Matt was pretty clear I wasn’t to do any of them.
I also stopped working on my manual. After a few months of this—but sooner than I expected—I was laid off by Carl and Matt for “budgetary” reasons. (Of course, they listed my job on Indeed that same day for a laughably low salary.)
I was given no warning, just sat down for a meeting with the two of them and walked out the door.
After leaving, coworkers told him it was getting bad.
Matt didn’t allow me to take anything from my desk, access my computer, or say my goodbyes to my coworkers. He was also very clear that I was not to retain any company documents or information. Sure thing, boss!
So I left, and I heard from coworkers still there that over the next few weeks, things took an even worse nosedive. They weren’t able to fill my job, and nobody could cover most of my actual job duties or any of my ancillary duties.
By this point, vendors weren’t being paid, and payroll wasn’t going out on time. And then I got the call.
Suddenly, Matt was calling him.
Matt found the file I had left in a conspicuous spot on the network drive: **____ JOB MANUAL AND PROCESSES.zip**
It was encrypted. What’s in it? Oh, just a draft of all my job duties and everything I was responsible for that I had worked on during downtime.
Why was it even encrypted? Well, it had a bunch of confidential data and passwords in it, boss!
To this day, he doesn’t know if Matt found it or not.
What’s the password? Sorry, boss, I don’t know. I didn’t retain it after leaving. But it’s in my files!
In reality, since it wasn’t finished, the manual wasn’t going to be some panacea for all the company’s problems, but I had padded it with a lot of images, so I imagine the file size was pretty attractive.
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And the password was indeed in my files. If Matt cared to look, he’d find an unlabeled sticky note with a nondescript string of letters and numbers in a random folder in one of my two dozen filing cabinets.
Geez! Those guys were almost too predictable.
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Let’s see if the people over at Reddit can relate with this at all.
That would probably be pretty satisfying.
Apparently, this person did something similar.
It is funny!
That’s a long password to remember.
This company really brought it all on themselves.
They had people who knew what they were doing, but they kept trying to fix things that weren’t broken.
Then they got rid of the very person who kept so much of the department running behind the scenes. That probably looked like a great idea on paper, but it obviously didn’t work out that way.
Hopefully they learned something from all of this because replacing experience with a cheaper employee doesn’t always save money. Sometimes it ends up costing a whole lot more.
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