My Heart Was Racing
I used to do IT work for a large university. A few years back, they decided that having specific IT people assigned to specific departments, and being paid by those departments, was a bad idea. Everything would be better if IT were centralized, then parsed back out to the departments (I argued that it was better to be paid and accountable to the people you were supposed to be helping, but that wasn’t really the goal in hindsight). In many places, that might work. At this place, it was going to be a disaster for reasons that aren’t relevant to the story.
I knew it was going to be a mess and didn’t want to work someplace where a user was required to fill out a ticket before I could even look at their problem, so I decided to leave. I found another job and gave my two weeks’ notice. As I was cleaning out my office on my last day, a professor came running down the hallway in a panic. I could feel my heartbeat getting faster.
This guy had been a huge pain in my behind for years. He was a jerk, he was condescending, he thought he knew anything that mattered about computers, etc. The standard blow-hard. I also knew he had been one of the biggest proponents of switching up how IT worked, and that on at least two occasions, he’d suggested that the best way to save money for the department would be to cut my position.
He always claimed that a central system would lead to faster response times, etc., so while I had always been professional with him, there really was no love lost (although I don’t think he knew I was aware of all the stuff he’d said in faculty meetings). Anyway, back to the story. He was huffing and puffing down the hallway, and when he got to me he said, “Oh, Derp, I’m so glad I caught you before you left. I’m giving a big presentation in 30 minutes to the administration! My computer won’t turn on, and my only copy of my presentation is on there!” I told him, “I’m sure if you fill out a ticket with the central IT desk, someone will be with you shortly”.
He just stopped in his tracks, and I think he suddenly pieced together that I knew exactly what things he’d been saying when I wasn’t around. He turned beet red and walked down the hall back to his lab and slammed the door shut. His computer wasn’t fixed in time.
Story credit: Reddit / alcimedes