rSlash - r/Prorevenge Fire Me? I'll Ruin Your Career!

Episode Date: March 5, 2023

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Welcome to R-Slash Pro Revenge, where a boss learns the hard way that you should never mess with the IT guy. Our next reddit posted from the Asperger admin. So I worked for this multinational company for over a decade as a system administrator. My responsibility was in the area of manufacturing, mostly for central systems that work on data flow between the manufacturing systems and the ERP system in real time. Even though the company had lots of cash for stupid projects, our IT budget was always too tight for our expensive, customized data munching systems. So shortly after starting to work at this company, I started implementing my own. I'm also an experienced software developer.

One of the reasons my original boss hired me. I won't go into too much detail, but I decided to make everything web-based so I could update things easier. It worked great, and over time, more and more functions got ported over into this easy-to-enhanced and easy-to-update system. Some of it was new stuff, and some of it was decades-old software that was in dire need of replacement. After about a decade, my system was rather central to the manufacturing process in many ways, and yes, there were hot standby servers with multiple backups each day and so on. Due to our severe budget constraints, I'm allowed to use open source software for my database.

I'm also allowed to use my own open source web system as the base for it all to keep it open source. I'm pleased about that because essentially my company was paying me to progress my own open source project, while they were getting a system upgrade. I always had the support of my bosses over the years, but in comes another new boss. In the first ever talk we have, he complains that my software is written in such and such programming language because it's so outdated. I tell him that that language is actively developed and used by a number of Fortune 500

companies for their back end and or front end systems. He's not happy. He also asked me how I do all the paperwork for the project and how my former bosses manage the project. I tell him I do everything by email so that everything is archived on the archive mail server as per law. Also, I explained that my former bosses didn't manage me because the users and department leaders were happy about how I manage the project myself. He is livid. A few weeks later, my boss accuses me that my work is a separate company within our company and it has to stop. And it doesn't matter if the whole company approves

of my work and speaks highly of me. He wants me to do much more completely useless paperwork, get approval for every small change or bug fix from two people, and is generally a dick when it comes to my work. He also loudly complains that I work alone in my projects, and that I try to ruin the company by doing so. And by the way, I've been asking every month for 10 years to be able to hire an assistant, but I've been denied every time. You have to understand, I have assburgers, and I'm generally not good with dealing with this stuff, but so far I always managed. This day was the first day ever that I left early, crying my eyes out in nearly 25 years of work. More bullying follows, and over the next year, my boss starts

taking away all of my duties, one at a time. This results in me not always making my 40 hours of work per week. You can only read Reddit so much per day before you start going insane. Yep, can't confirm. Now, after everything's over, I realize that this was his main tactic after all, to get me fired for now working as long as my coworkers. But it just didn't click with me at the time, because nothing like that has ever happened to me. My boss forces me to train my backup near the end of February.

I only have one day to train him. He's very young and inexperienced, and I can plan to my boss that I have to teach him over a decade of software development and knowledge about company rules and processes. He also doesn't know the programming language. The next day, after having to attend an expensive one hour training course, HR calls me in and tells me it's my last day of work. I don't get the usual 90 day notice, it's just my last day. This is rather unusual in my country, and it's only legal if both parties agree. I agree though, since

I get a nice severance package and unemployment benefits starting the next day. I don't mention to HR that I was planning to quit the next month anyway because of the constant bullying. I have one hour to clean out my desk and say goodbye to my co-workers. The last thing I do is to have my backup delete my accounts as per company policy while I watch. This includes my administrator account in my web system. Then I leave. I go home, cut all company access to my privately owned public source code management temporarily, then I work through the weekend to basically fork my own project under a new name, renaming all the classes and stuff and release it back on my SCM under a new name. I do that just

so the company will have a hard time implementing all the bug fixes and security updates that I do in the future. What I accidentally on purpose forgot to mention in the heat of the moment is that all the system documentation for the web system is also stored on the system and is linked to the user account of whoever wrote it, which in this case is me. OP gets a little technical here so I'm not going to read all this, but basically when OP's replacement deleted OP's account from the software, it also deleted all the information that was under his username. So basically, all the work that OP has done for this company has just gone. A week goes by, and then the messages start flooding in.

Parts of my software aren't doing their job, and parts of the manufacturing process has ground to a halt in multiple production plants. The documentation is nowhere to be found and they can't figure out what's wrong. From what I gather after I left, they realize that I had a second account on the system, marked developer account, do not change without talking to OP first. My replacement deleted it since I wasn't working at the company anymore. This also deleted a number of rather critical maintenance tasks running under that system account so the system went belly up. Chaos ensued and emergency meetings were held. That's when they started contacting me. My replacement said,

You need to come in and fix the problem right away. Executives are already on the phone and they're going nuts! Sorry bro, I don't work for that company anymore. But it's your system! Was my system. Past tense. I got fired last week, remember? I don't work there anymore.

But where in trouble? First, since I don't work there anymore, you just violated company policy by telling me all that stuff. I could get you fired for that. But I'm not going to, because you're the somewhat innocent bystander in all this. Secondly, on the day that I was fired, HR told me they wanted to get me out the door right away, because a disgruntled worker with my kind of system knowledge is a security nightmare. But you aren't disgruntled, are you?

No, but there's no way for your management to be sure of that. Are you willing to take full responsibility if you let me in and I hack your systems? Uh, no, my boss isn't paying me that well, you see. And third, if I help you in any way shape or form, I might be in deep trouble. What? You see, the company cannot file a lawsuit against one of their own employees if something goes wrong by accident. Suppliers have similar statements in their contracts and are also insured.

I'm neither of those, and if I do something wrong, or the company just says I did, even if I didn't, then I'm suddenly in deep financial trouble. I just can't take the risk. What if we hire you as an external contractor? I'd have to open a company, get insurance, go through negotiation with your purchasing department to get my company in your supplier's list, then I'd have to write you an offer which you then have to get signed by such and such. This would take all and all like two to four months. After all that, I'll have to wait all in all, like two to four months. After

all that, I'll have to wait for the money for another three to four months. So, sorry, I decline. Please help me and my boss, the guy who fired OP, are in very hot water. What can we do? Sorry, I can't help the company because it would be a risk to me. And it would be against your own company policy to allow me to help. Pretty please. Tell you what, call the executives yourself, don't go through your boss and tell them exactly what happened. Tell them that you broke the system by deleting those user accounts on your boss's order.

And tell them that you didn't know what would happen because you didn't have enough training or experience. You just relied on your boss's orders. As it turns out, my replacement did actually call up the executives a few days later. My boss went through hell, got himself fired, and he was put on the never higher again anywhere in this company, Blacklist, for another expensive stunt he pulled, which the company realized shortly after he was kicked out. How do I know?

I still have lots of friends at the company, and I hear stuff through the grapevine. My replacement still has his job, and a new, even more incompetent boss. So my replacement is ready to find a new job. Yesterday he asked me about planning his company exit, which reminded me of the story, so here I am telling it to you. I feel like if you're hiring a manager for an IT department or even just an IT person, you need to teach them the number one rule about managing IT people, which is to never, ever, mess with the IT guy. Business notifications getting out of hand, buried under an avalanche of customer emails, texts, and social media messages, IT guy. Get Command Center for free today at thrifedotca. That's THR-Y-V dot CA.

Terms and conditions apply. Free plans have limited functionality. Our next reddit post is from a bunch of numbers. My twin brother, who's 25, has been with his wife since we were 15, and they've been married for the last year. Since day one, my sister-in-law has not been a fan of my family. She and my brother met doing the same after school club, a club that my best friend happened to also be in. My friend told me that my sister-in-law always complained about my family, my mother, my father, and me.

And how we all treated her terribly, though when we asked her, she would never go into detail. Because there was no detail. In fact, for the first few years of their relationship, my sister-in-law was the daughter that my mother wished she'd had. My sister-in-law seemed happy enough to be around us, and my parents always made sure to include her on family occasions such as birthdays. Since we were all 15 and moody teenagers, we just thought that she was being dramatic. The years go by, and my brother and sister-in-law stay together, even though

they go to universities 150 miles apart, then they move in together at about the six-year mark of their relationship. I lived at home for a year after my brother moved out. During that time, we had tons of meals where we invited both my brother and my sister-in-law. But only my brother showed up, along with some lame excuse about why his sister-in-law couldn't come. Then, inevitably, my sister-in-law would call up my brother, telling him that he had to come home early due to some BS reason. While some of those reasons may have been genuine, every time that he was over for more than half an hour, he would get calls and messages saying

that her world was imploding if he didn't come home right this instant. I think my parents politely excused this behavior as young love, but obviously she was shunning them. My mother was especially shunned. Every month, she would invite my sister-in-law out for a girl's day and was always told no. After the wedding, which none of our side of the family was allowed to be involved in,

I got a few messages from mutual friends of myself and my brother asking what the drama was between us and my sister-in-law, who had evidently been telling people all night that we had been awful throughout the wedding process, and her and her new husband were on the verge of going no contact with us. We hadn't heard anything about this from my brother, who we were still very much in contact with. A couple of people thought that it was odd that she was saying this, and forwarded screenshots of my sister-in-law telling them full stories and complete lies. My favorite was this made up story about my father storming around their house, demanding

they give them hundreds of dollars of cash to cover his gambling debts. And all the while, my mother was supposedly throwing salt around their garden to try to kill the grass. But my father has never gambled anything more than a couple of hundred pounds in the lottery, and they don't have grass around their house to begin with. And most of all, my parents were actually out of the country at the time that my sister-in-law sent the, oh my god, you won't believe what just happened! Message to at least two of my friends. I'm not a petty person, and so I didn't go in all guns blazing. But the next time I saw my parents,

I said that it seemed like my sister-in-law was spreading potentially harmful lies. They both said that they knew that my sister-in-law didn't seem to like them, but they had decided many years ago to try to kill her with kindness, even if only to not give her any real ammunition against them. I decided to sit on what I had evidence-wise,

unless my sister-in-law did something major. Well, that major thing came over Christmas. For years and years, my brother and sister-in-law had rotated between her family and my family. This year was supposed to be with my family. They live in the same town as both of their families, so it wouldn't be a massive journey for anyone to go anywhere. So, we get there bright and early on Christmas day to find my brother alone. I ask where my sister-in-law is, and I'm told that she's having a family emergency, but she'll be over before the meal. I've got no issues there. Family emergency or not. We all start prepping the meal,

and my brother's phone is ringing the whole time. He stops answering for a period of time. Then he takes one particularly long call that he goes outside for. He confirms that it's his sister-in-law, however, he says that it's just her phone messing up and constantly calling the last number on the call list. A bit of a lame excuse, but whatever. The ringing eventually stops. By this point, my brother's off playing with one of my dad's old cars and everything's in the oven,

so we chill out for a while, and we look at social media at all the cheesy Christmas present posts. Me and my partner are just scrolling away, looking at friends' presence. When my partner's screen comes up with a post by my sister-in-law into a Facebook group called something like Murderous Mother-in-law Support Group that had only been posted like five minutes before. We later assumed that most of

us were blocked from seeing our sister-in-law's posts, but she had accidentally let my partner slip through the net. The post said something like, My husband is forcing me to go to his horrid family's Christmas dinner. They make me do all the cooking on my own, but tell me that it's horrible. His sister even assaulted me the last time that I went to their house, and she's just been kicked out of rehab, so she's back there again. I'm scared every day that my husband is going to believe their lies about me and leave me.

I'd rather kill myself than do this. Can I get some support, ladies? Hard emoji, hard emoji, hard emoji. What a bunch of BS. We all continue cooking, and if anything, my father is doing most of the cooking. For clarity, I've never been addicted to anything, and like my parents have said, they never said a bad word about my sister-in-law to anyone, so she can't claim that they did. This was it for me. I excused myself, and I went up to the

office to print off copies of the messages that she had sent to friends previously, and the post in the group that my partner screenshot at my request. I printed off enough copies for everyone at the table and wrapped them all up in groups. I then stuck some labels on them as being from Father Christmas. I slipped downstairs and put them under the tree, claiming there were some more gifts that I'd found. The day continues. My sister-in-law arrives and apologizes for the delay.

Everyone says it's not a problem, and the food gets cooked, served, and eaten. We've always opened presents after lunch, so everyone gets set up with each other's presents, as well as the mystery Father Christmas present that everyone seemed to get. Someone eventually opens a father Christmas present and starts to read before asking my sister-in-law what she means by us being a horrid family. My parents, brother, and sister-in-law all quickly open theirs and read them through. My sister-in-law goes white as a sheet and starts asking who did this, but my brother tells her that she brought this on herself and that she's gone too far.

My parents say nothing to anyone, and eventually my sister-in-law excuses herself. My brother said that since the day they started dating, she decided that our family hates her, and she spent years trying to prove it, ranging from the order their names are written in cards to the number of potatoes she served at a meal. She obviously has no evidence because there is none. My brother had no clue about the messages or Facebook groups, but expected there to be many more. He decided to leave, apologize to us, and contacted us about half an hour later saying they were both at home and stable, since they killed myself. Part of the post worried my mother especially. I kept quiet about

my role in this until everyone else had left. My mother suspected that it was me, but said that she was happy that this would actually be out in the open. I apologize profusely for ruining the day before we left. None of this was my finest moment, which I'm sure some of you reading will agree with. My brother has been in contact with my parents and me to further apologize for everything my sister-in-law has said and done, and he said that he's not going to make any rash decisions yet, but they need to sit and talk about everything. At first, I thought your sister-in-law was just mean and petty, but after reading this whole story,

I think she needs professional help. Normally, I would just think that she's trying to lie and manipulate her husband because she just doesn't want to spend time with you, but she's making these posts to a support group, which no one will see. This is purely for her own benefit. So does she believe it?

Does she like create lies and then believe her lies? Yo, something is wrong here, something is wrong with this woman. I hope your brother manages to escape her because she's some weird combination of abusive, toxic and mentally disturbed. That was our slash pro revenge and if you like this content, be sure to follow my podcast because I put out new Reddit podcast episodes every single day.