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When an employee gets fired, you have to be careful to ensure that they didn’t cause any problems before they were walked out.

What would you do if your company phone systems kept randomly being put into holiday mode, which prevented you from getting any calls, every few months?

That is what happened to the people in this story, and after many months of trying to figure it out, they found that a former employee set it up to have this issue before he was fired, even if they can’t prove it.

That was quite an epic revenge from the former employee. Read through the full story below and see what you think of what happened.

Ghost In The Phones

I work a company that sells phone systems. We have a small isolated one just for our office. It runs on kind of a crappy server. But we are the only ones that use it so, it’s fine.

This seems like a pretty normal testing feature.

Anyhow, one day we just can’t get phone calls. This happens sometimes. Everyone in the company has access to the office phones system and tests stuff sometimes.

No big deal, we sort it pretty quickly. Someone manually enabled the “Independence Day” holiday. So, even though it’s not actually the 4th of July, there’s a switch you can flip to force the system to believe it is.

They can’t figure out who

This is useful I swear. Just weird to do it for a static holiday like this. So, one of the other guys sees this, flips it back and we are all good. Well kinda.

Fixing it means we have no idea who did it originally because the metadata got overwritten in the database. And log retention is super short because, yea it’s a crappy little server that its on.

Once again, they need those logs.

Then, a month or so later it happens again. Support manager is flipping out. Hes out for blood and is going to track the person down and probably do a mortal combat finishing move on them.

Except, logs are gone and the database says the last time it was messed with was a couple months ago. But, it’s been working all this time? Nothing to do at this point though.

This isn’t a huge deal, but it does sound annoying.

This happens a few more times, each time months apart. Support manager is livid. He wants to build out a whole new system just for support. But no one has time to take the project.

He wants logging for longer, but operations just says no for “reasons”. Customers largely don’t know because most of them just email and we catch it before they notice.

Finally, they will be able to track it down.

So, upper management bobble-heads “yes we should fix” then promptly forgets about the problem. But we all know it’s just going to take one time with the wrong customer and we are dead.

Finally we catch it. We get a note from a client saying they can’t call in. We just got a call not too long ago. Operations is pulling the logs. Now we will know!

This seems like a serious security vulnerability.

We look at the logs and it says that the holiday was enabled via an extension. Oh yea, our system can do that too. You can setup an extension to trigger this.

People use it for lunch breaks. It’s kinda nice actually. But why did someone set it up for Independence Day, and why is someone calling a random extension to trigger it?

Of course, someone wanted revenge.

Ok, time to look at the config. It’s tied to… a random external phone number?! Oh! And we got a call to the number very recently! Trace it back, yep, external call triggered this. Call the number back and it’s a random telemarketer. Well, let’s find out who made this monstrosity!

Operations pulls the metadata on the weird extension config. And it was :drumroll please: us. Someone on the support team did this shortly before being fired.

Honestly, this is pretty funny.

Developers confirm, extension routed holiday overrides don’t update owner/timestamp data in the database. So, whenever some random telemarketer called this random number, it nuked our support line without a trace.

Look, we can’t prove this was intentional. I just saying, if you’re out there, you know who you are. And I know that you know what you did. One way or another, respect; this was an epic way to go out.

At least this guy can see the humor and effort that was put into this revenge. Let’s just hope that it didn’t cost the company too many customers.

Check out what the people in the comments have to say about this story.

Here is someone who almost implemented a similar system.

This should be a big concern.

Here is someone who loves the story.

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about a widow who returned to a store to thank employees for their kindness to her late husband.

Let’s hope whoever did this finds this story.

This would be the icing on the cake.

The former employee got his revenge. The best part is that they couldn’t prove it.

Sometimes, you have to respect the person who pulls something like this off.