She Was Gone Within a Month
This happened several years ago. I was working for a small medical supply company as the IT manager. Business was bad, and eventually the IT department had to downsize to just me. During this time, they brought in a new CFO that I had to report directly to. Let’s call her Pam.
Pam had zero knowledge of IT and how things worked. Her motto was if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. PC/server lifecycles didn’t exist. We don’t have to pay for licensing to keep our firewall updated, it’s working just fine now.
I went from having an annual budget to a “wish list” where she would deny everything I asked for. The couple that owned the company were real pieces of garbage too. One time we had a quarterly meeting and people were asking about how secure their jobs were.
The owners said that nobody was getting laid off and that our jobs were all secure. This was at 5:00 pm on a Wednesday. The very next morning at 9:00 am, they laid off six people. At noon, one of the owners showed up to show off the Escalade that he had just purchased that morning.
During the first six months that Pam was there, she started firing everyone that worked for the old CFO and replaced them with her friends and family. Honestly, three of her bridesmaids from her wedding a few years prior got hired to replace those that she fired. I knew I was on borrowed time.
After she had been there for nine months, I was the only one left out of what was about a dozen people that worked for the old CFO. I knew my time was running out. I had been looking for work, but the 2008 crash just happened and the job market in my area went south quickly.
Sure enough, she called me into HR and blindsided me with an entirely trumped up charge that she claimed happened the day before. I was working with the VP of sales on a project that entire day, so I had a witness.
I asked to bring him in since my boss was lying and was told, “this is not about him, this is about you.” Remember kids: HR is there to protect the business, not do what is right. The next morning, I get introduced to an IT “expert” who just so happens to be Pam’s 21-year-old nephew.
He was to shadow me and evaluate everything that I did to see if we could streamline any processes. In other words, they wanted me to train him to do my job. I quickly learned that this kid had absolutely no knowledge of IT. He’s the kid people think is an IT expert because he can hook up a Playstation to a TV.
He didn’t even know how to join a PC to a domain. So I knew what had to be done. The inventory, billing, and shipping and receiving were all run by scripts that I created on the server. They were all run using the domain admin account. I raised quite a fuss about giving him the domain admin account in front of Pam.
I then loudly proclaimed that I was going to change the password to it since you can’t have people who don’t work for the company to have admin access to our network. I was overruled and was told to give it to him. I complied, but I also showed him multiple times how to change passwords on the domain.
I even had him write it down to make sure that he could do it. I really stressed the importance of changing the admin password and deleting his local account the second he is no longer “consulting” with us to him. I showed him a few things (but nothing in regards to what really made the company run) that day.
There wasn’t enough time in a year to bring this kid up to speed on how to run that place due to his complete ignorance of IT. I come into work the next day and sure enough I was let go because her nephew had found “my skills lacking in many areas.” I collect my last pay check and head home.
The next morning, I get a call from the CFO and owners. Apparently, her nephew wasn’t quite up to speed on everything we did there and she was graciously offering to pay me my regular salary to come in as a consultant and get her nephew up to speed on the IT infrastructure.
I told her that I was now an independent contractor, and if she wanted my services I was going to charge her $200 per hour with a 250 hour minimum. At that point, she told me that she was going to call the authorities for what I did if I didn’t come in and fix everything.
My response was “Just so we’re clear, you fired me, replaced me with a completely unqualified idiot, and now you’re threatening to call the authorities on me if I don’t come in and fix what he did? I’ll hold, please call them and let me know what they said.”
She started cursing at me and hung up the phone. Turns out, her nephew did actually learn something from me: He changed the admin password after I had left. The one that ran all the scripts for inventory, billing, shipping, and ordering.
According to some of my co-workers, the place was dead in the water for several days until they could get a real consultant in to go through the documentation that I had created and fix the issue. The nephew was immediately fired and Pam was gone within a month. Story credit: Reddit / red23011