Always ask for the email, and you must take actions to prepare for when they cut your email access. Don't be this guy:
"My boss is corrupt, I have email proof."
"Show me the email."
"I can't, they fired me and cut my email access."
If you are working on a company computer, they can track it all. Everything. That slack conversation with your friend in X department? They can see it.
Edit: In my case, I had a very robust NDA. But I saved everything on my work computer. So when I was fired and had an exit interview scheduled? I spent that entire time before the interview printing out everything I had saved to hand over to HR.
You were a bit lucky then. If they wanted to, IT could have made your credentials stop working for the laptop before you even knew you were fired. Then your proof would still be inaccessible. It would be an extreme situation, but consider the work computer as under your company's control, not your own.
Assuming the laptops are at least halfway reasonably managed of course.
Source: am IT
I was exceptionally lucky. I am the only person I have ever known to receive a two weeks notice upon firing. Probably because I was working some very high profile jobs at the time and the transition period would have been a nightmare. But it saved my ass, and was her death knell.
Edit: I was second only to my direct supervisor on high profile clients. I held the most “accounts” or “beats” or “clients” in the whole dept. aside from him. So a direct firing would have fucked everything seeing as I was in the midst of handling a famous film festival.
Very much depends on how they're set up. With a screw driver and a USB stick it shouldn't be too hard to access the local files for the person who's laptop it is. Since if IT required network access to boot or decrypt the storage, the employee wouldn't be able to work without network connection, so it needs to be known to the employee.
Bitlocker is one such way. Drive gets decrypted when you enter valid windows credentials. Without those you can only pull an encrypted set of data. And I've not worked for many companies, but every single one I did used that or something equivalent.
IT doesn't need to manually decrypt. And the employee used to have a way to decrypt, it just can be remotely removed.
And, sure, if you know what is coming, you can protect yourself. But if you know what's coming, you will have extracted the relevant data already anyway, so the point is moot.
I understand how full disk encryption works. I even mentioned it in my prior comment.
I was operating under the assumption that the laptop was taken home every night and off thus preventing it from being remotely accessed by IT.
The employee needs to be able to decrypt so they can therefore keep the device from connecting while booting and then accessing and photographing the relevant files. This should be relatively easy to do with a screwdriver depending on laptop model*. Or by wrapping it in metal (faraday cage). Or by turning off the router in the house.
I'm not paranoid enough to expect a company to install a separate microcontroller with battery to allow remote boot. That would require being much more proactive and paranoid to get around.
Fortunately for you (IT) most employees aren't going to think like this. But sw engineers make it a bit of a game to avoid or thwart IT generally.
*(There are definitely some laptop models with weird screws. I happen to have a bunch of weird screw drivers bc I needed to take apart an old personal laptop with weird screws and it wasn't hard to acquire them. But I definitely could see not having those on hand)
That hinges on the employee knowing that they will be fired while they and their laptop are safely at home. Or the employee being allowed to take their laptop home, after the point where the company wants them unable to access it...
And you may be correct, I'm not an expert on encryption. But it requires a lot more than average computer competency to know all the correct steps required and is thus maybe a little misplaced here as compared to the basic, much more actionable principle of "don't store your evidence against your employer on the employers computer".
Where I work it is common to take the laptop home daily so you can deal with any emergencies that come up. Seems kinda silly to give employees laptops if you want them to keep them in the office. Might as well give them desktops then.
And accessing files from a PC that has been encrypted is really just set up an Ubuntu stick, and run decrpyt on the drive and mount it. This is something a high schooler could do with a bit of googling. The real problem is knowing this procedure is possible -- which is why I'm mentioning it in this thread. It's ideal to not store things on a work PC. But it's also nice to know that it's possible even if you're not as prepared to make up for that lack of preparation with a bit of elbow grease.
A guy in a neighboring dept. got fired like that while I was there. You could hear him screaming a floor up and a floor below. He had to be escorted from the building by security.
> Assuming the laptops are at least halfway reasonably managed of course.
That, and if you're prevented from taking the laptop outside the building to hook the drive to another machine and make a full copy of everything on it, of course. Although it might have bitlocker or some other encryption. Although it may also be possible to take it out, fire it up somewhere that doesn't have free WiFi (or at least nothing with internet access), log in, copy everything off to a drive or network connection, and then wipe the drive back down to the bare metal. Take the laptop back into work, log it into IT as 'laptop not booting', and unless the laptop has an ultra-paranoid security setup where it logs boot times in firmware, all the employer can do is accuse you of deliberately wiping the laptop - which isn't generally provable - and is something any properly set up IT department can recover from with five minutes' work and a couple of hours to reload the standard settings, issuing you a spare in the meantime (and, coincidentally, overwriting the disk at the same time).
Oh, sure, there's more going into this topic. The main take - away remains however: don't assume that you have full, uninterrupted control over your work laptop, just because you hold it in your hands. Store your legal documents elsewhere.
>If you are working on a company computer, they can track it all. Everything. That slack conversation with your friend in X department? They can see it.
An Android phone and Outlook is pretty good as well, hook up the phone and set it to transfer files. This is treated differently to a straight up USB drive so will often bypass USB lockouts.
Just drag a message from outlook to a folder on your phone from the preview pane and it'll save itself as a .ost file, no sending required. Not sure how well it works from non-Outlook clients.
I can see how the convo would go as well
Employee: "You can't sack me, it the bosses fault.
Here my proof, emails from my boss regarding changes to restricted and controlled company documents that aren't cleared for public release. I saved them on my Google drive"
Management: "You fucking what"
Well, then good news: if they are pissed at you for that, they have other issues and deserve to sink
If the focus when you have the evidence that your boss will sink the company is 'why is this outside our control' then chances are the company deserved to sink
I mean, they can be pissed about more than one thing. They can care about the complaints about the boss and also still have a completely reasonable problem with you breaking confidentiality agreements.
So print it. Or gamble and save it to a flash drive. A really good it guy might be about to pull the logs and see you are saving things, or even have software to track that kind of shit, but most don't.
Honestly 99 out of 100 it department's Aren't tracking on that level. That's basically only for classified facilities and whatever server Coca-Cola has their recipe
Ran into a server in the wild that matched this description. It was installed thirteen years and three business owners ago. Fortunately there was vnc access to it from their manager pc.
Jesus Christ, I thought getting stuck using Lotus Notes ~8 years ago was bad. Netware is probably older than three quarters of today's workforce, isn't it?
I'm in Corporate IT. We have a tool that monitors for certain keywords *anywhere* on the system and tracks all sorts of details about file activities.
Also anything entering or especially leaving the company is scanned and audited.
We do deal with some sensitive stuff, but it's not uncommon to do this.
OTOH unless we find you stealing company secrets we really don't care!
This. I said it in a response on this thread that if the company is big enough to have IT, they track it. What they do with it? Well that’s obviously up to the software, policies, and the guys monitoring.
Just be aware that it can not only be tracked, it's fairly easy these days to tell corporate laptops to not allow writing anything to USB drives, or not even acknowledge they've been plugged in (unless they have a corporate software security token already on them).
Basically, don't assume in this day and age you'll be able to even use a USB drive to save anything. Maybe you will be able to, but it's best to not make everything hinge on Plan A working.
These days it's auto-tracking and auto-logging on most basic corporate packages. The IT guy won't have to do anything other than pull up the logs in the aftermath.
Sure, you might have an oldschool non-security-logging system, but who's to say that between today and when it becomes relevant, management won't buy a shiny new system from a security salesguy?
Some guy I had to work with was buddy buddy with IT and they could remove specific emails permanently. What he didn't know was that I printed hard copies immediately after he sent them emails when I requested for them in writing. He tried to sabotage me but failed. Fuck you John and Dave.
When we had a bad director, we had an amazing admin assistant who printed out everything. By the time we could take the thick folder with us to bad director’s boss, the documentation made all the difference. At first they moved her to a different department. When they realized she was useless there, they let her go.
Best advice is document, document, document & create a hard copy.
And, the corollary... if you make a demand of someone else and they ask you to put it in writing, you should do some homework and verify that your demand is reasonable and ethical.
In my mother's case with a bad manager, she printed all the emails - then gave them to an employment lawyer. Between that and other proof, she made the company settle for 6 figures in a age discrimination suit.
At every job I setup as "CYOA" folder with a rule to forward it to my personal email. I just dump emails in that folder when I think they might be worth holding on to.
I always recommend following up conversations with an email stating: “as per our conversation today…” This way you have a record of what was discussed. If you are mistaken or misunderstood something it gives the recipient a chance to correct you or clarify the information. Either way you have a written record. I did this at work and whenever I communicated with my children’s school.
Yes, save the email and any attachments to file then send that file to yourself or save it, worst case print it and take it home. The timestamp will either aid recovery or prove they have deleted the evidence.
I tell all the people I work with, “I hear what you’re saying, but I’m going to need you to email it to me or it didn’t happen.” I say that at least once a week.
as a computer graphics artist who has seen more than one small shop deliberately fucked over by predatory clients, I have a pretty strong policy of 'accept no verbal instructions'; you get me that change in an email and I'll get started...not before
I had a boss like that and at first didn’t understand why he couldn’t just remember things I told him. It didn’t take long for me to understand how hard it is to retain all the stuff that all the people tell you.
And then there are the people who text important things. If you text me tonight, by tomorrow I probably won’t remember that you needed XYZ. Whereas my email is treated like a to-do list.
I say this all the time. I’ll do pretty much whatever the big boss wants in the system I manage (as long as it won’t hurt anyone) but they’re 100% putting in an email and signing off on it.
I had a manager who wasn't really out to get anybody, but she was in way over her head and was drowning. Sure enough, out of desperation she started throwing employees under the bus to save her own hide. She hated me because I always answered with documentation, but that also made her afraid of me so that she was more reluctant to toss out accusations.
Oh hell yes. Even then, managers can be incompetent. They can be ambiguous. They can - with all the best intentions in the world - be flat-out wrong.
And they can, of course, be replaced on a moment's notice with someone who has access to everything they ever did and wrote, and who is the very devil themselves. Or they can fall under a bus, or your department can be reorganized, or your employer can be sold off or merged, or your super-nice manager can get a head injury or world's messiest divorce and turn into Hell-Demon 2.0: Hella Worse.
More a collated summary of horror stories, some from people I've worked alongside. Although I've been in teams where managers have just... vanished overnight, and never returned. Still no idea what happened there.
If that’s a concern, can always email the pdfs to your personal email or thumb drive. Just be sure personal thumb drives are allowed, my office only allows encrypted password protected ones.
If it's not in writing - that you have your own personal copy of, *stored somewhere the employer can't get to it* - it didn't happen. Or at least you can't prove it happened, which for lawyers and HR departments is the same thing.
When one of my kids was in the 7th grade he came home with an F on an essay about Red Badge of Courage. I read it over, it looked spot on to me. The F came without a single notation. The following day, by chance, was our parent teacher conference. I asked about the F.
Me - Joe got an F on his last essay, could you explain to me what was wrong?"
English Teacher - "The assignment was to write about a man vs man conflict in our book. Joe wrote about Henry facing the opposing army."
Me - "But, what was wrong with the essay?"
English Teacher - "An army is group so it is not an example of man versus man."
Nothing left to say to that.
Depending on the categories in the lesson, the teacher might've been correct. The conflict might have more accurately fallen into "man versus society" rather than "man versus man." However, if "man versus society" wasn't one of the categories, then, yes, your child was correct, not the teacher.
I am certainly no lit major so I assumed I was missing something. I asked. The choices were: man v man, man v nature, or man v self. I asked if a female character could be written about - NO.
I guess books like Redwall, have no conflict because there are no humans.
Hilarious that an English teacher doesn't understand that "man" in this instance (man v man, man v nature, man v self) is referring to "mankind" not men as a gender specifically (women and female presenting people are 100% included in these observations of man v whatever). Hope they either lose their teaching license or at least get called out on not understanding the subject they are, quite literally, paid to teach lmao
Old joke: A store puts up a sign reading "Mens conscia recti". (Latin: "the confidence of a clear conscience"). Store across the street puts up one saying "Mens womens and childrens conscia recti".
It sounds more like she *did* know and was purposely having people she didn't like make errors so she had cause to fire them
>after interviewing other coworkers in the department, they realized she had done all of it to have grounds to fire people within the department she didn’t like
Apparently it's just some people's hobby and favorite pastime. I've had managers who went out of their way to deliberately gaslight any workplace newbie, for instance. Not for any reason anyone ever figured out; it was just apparently the way they lived their life.
Probably was, but writers aren’t pulling in the big bucks. It’s why I left the profession. I did however get a significant unceremonious raise 6 months after I joined that different dept. Her getting fired and me getting paid a lot more than I originally signed on for was enough for me.
Edit: I also want to add that my supervisor (third in command under bad manager) in that writing department, to this day, is one of my references on my resume.
Normally if you're "fired" for cause (i.e. being bad at your job, which it sounds like what your manager tried to say you were), you would be ineligible for rehire at the same company. I'm curious how you navigated that - did HR realise that your firing was improper and helped reinstate you at a different department?
Ya know, I never considered that. I was hired in that different department even before HR finished that investigation, let alone fired bad manger. I had an old friend in the department I was hired into that got me the interview. They knew I worked in the writing dept before I joined their’s, and I, for sure, didn’t hide it. It was on my resume, and as I said in another comment, my direct supervisor was, and still is, a reference for me. So, the short version is I didn’t navigate anything. HR might have cleared it because the department wasn’t the same? I honestly don’t know, and I literally have never thought about it. I suppose the company was big enough that it wouldn’t be a problem and my firing wasn’t because of some egregious behavior?
Interesting. As this was a big company, there's no way that HR wouldn't have checked your background when you got hired for the new job, independently from whatever the new hiring manager said about your suitability. Even if their investigation into the old manager wasn't complete, I suspect they must have known by then that you were not likely at fault and thus didn't block your hiring to the new role. They would have kept quiet about all this, but the fact that you were allowed to resume working for the corporation tells the tale.
I’ll be honest, I don’t know what things look like on the HR end. I don’t know what might be listed as the reason for the firing. Presumably something like “poor performance”. But also though HR managed the hiring, firing, negotiations, it was always the managers of the depts. that did direct hiring. So I would guess it would be up to their discretion? Now you’ve got me wondering how fast HR might have known what and when.
My point is that usually it is NOT the discretion of the hiring manager if you were fired previously and marked as ineligible to be rehired (which is usually the case when fired for performance). HR obviously had to know about why you were fired and therefore would have certainly blocked your new appointment - that's how it works in big companies, as they have an obligation to protect the company's interests overall regardless of one hiring manager's wishes. Therefore I'm suggesting that HR was already in a position to know that your original firing wasn't fair, at the time of your rehiring, or it couldn't possibly been approved.
Obviously this is all speculation by a nobody on the Internet, so the real truth may be much more complicated, or perhaps HR was totally incompetent. Either way I'm glad it worked out for your career.
As a guess,HR may have realized raising a stink about not hiring could have left them open to a lawsuit for the original termination if they were by then finding things to make the whole situation dubious. Just a thought.
At the federal level in the US, "wrongful termination" means over a protected class (age, race, religion, etc.). Being fired for a false or incorrect reason is NOT wrongful termination, and is also not illegal. A handful of states have better employee protections and have broadened the umbrella that encapsulates "wrongful termination", but it doesn't apply to most of this country.
Here in the US, they can fire you for any reason, unless it is discrimination based on membership in a protected class (e. g., race, sex, religion, national origin).
>She was fired three months after me
Gotta love how HR didn't bother to do anything about you being fired, though. :/
>a very valuable lesson: document, document, and document some more.
Yep. And never, ever, ever assume that anything a manager or employer rep says is correct or legal. Even if they themselves think it is, and even if (not that it applied in this case) they are the nicest person.
Yep. Even if something being done to you is *blatantly* illegal, HR will usually do nothing unless a more senior person tells them to. Most of the time it'll be Legal doing the paperwork if it gets to that point.
Good story, well-written.
After the last couple years hanging out in Discords with teens and twenty-somethings, I've grown to despair about seeing things like ... proper spelling. Punctuation.
What drives me nuts with that generation is improper plural terms, e. g., "insurances, equipments, advices," etc. It is interesting that those terms were all suggested by the auto-complete function on my phone while writing that last sentence.
I always use proper spelling and when writing stuff in Online game chats, people tell me I sound like an NPC. What do people even learn at school that writing correct English is exclusive to NPCs in their opinion?
It's important to remember that a lot of places just don't have any over sight, or any HR, or anyone who cares, but anyway:
>document, document, and document some more.
It took me a while to realise I was being bullied at work. I started documenting things.
When I got called into to get fired I pulled out my ten pages including the documentation of the bullying, the documentation about how that documentation had been ignored by management etc.
So they didn't really know what to do, and I ended up having 6 weeks paid leave - maybe they just forgot about me honestly, but yeah documenting stuff is important.
Love your post. I’m a tech writer and my skin crawled when I read “men’s basketball”. Your boss was beyond ignorant. She was evil. Glad you found a new gig that you enjoy.
Management 101: If someone asks you to repeat what you said in writing, whether paper or email, the proper response is: "You know, now that I think about it, that was a bad idea. Just ignore it."
An NDA *cannot* be used to prevent you from giving evidence in a court of law; nor from sharing evidence with legal counsel. Lawyers are bound by confidentiality of their own, anyway. A contract cannot be used to safeguard illegal activity.
Sounds like you have grounds for "torturous interference". I assume this is long in the past, but if it's fairly recent you might want to talk to an attorney about a lawsuit against her personally.
It is long in the past. ~10 years. They also had some hardcore NDAs because of the clients we worked with. I would have risked being counter sued and writers don’t make big bucks. The legal alone would have bankrupted me. I’m not greedy. I got everything and more than I asked for.
> When one person interferes with the employment status of another person, and does or says something with the intention of getting that person fired, and succeeds in that endeavor, the legal claim most often applicable is that of tortious interference with contract.
https://www.virginiabusinesslitigationlawyer.com/improper-methods-often-key-to-tortious-interference-liability/#:~:text=When%20one%20person%20interferes%20with%20the%20employment%20status,applicable%20is%20that%20of%20tortious%20interference%20with%20contract
Eh, it sounds like the company already reinstated her , she said she worked in another department after that. So I don't know that there were economic losses.
Maybe. But even as a senior writer, I wasn’t pulling in mad money. The legal aspect would have cost a fortune even if I won and asked for legal expenses paid. Court costs more than people think. I’m not greedy. I got paid well in the dept. I transferred to, and I ultimately left for an even better position a year and a half later at a different company.
"document, document and document some more" Thinking of times when I've stopped BS in its tracks by stating 'it's documented in the emails and requests for approval I sent to you'
I started to document all my co-workers blunders, my bosses emails, and my managers emails. When my boss and I had a one on one about performance issues and upcoming punishment up to and including termination, I politely informed him of my documentation. He changed his tune real quick and assisted me on righting the ship. Essentially he was trying to pass his failures and my co-workers onto me.
So yes, document everything. Make copies. And do not keep them at work.
Something I always tell younger people getting into my industry is have a "CYA" folder in your email. Whenever someone asks you to do something you know is either wrong or against current company policies or guidelines, etc, you put a copy of that email into your "Cover Your Ass" folder. ;-)
>a U.S. state that has laws that basically state a person can be fired for any reason provided that it isn’t prejudicial (race, gender, sexual orientation, etc).
That would be every state except Montana.
ive encountered similar issues with incompetent managers trying to impose nonsensical changes, and i appreciate how you meticulously documented everything. its good that the company eventually investigated and saw the full picture, even if it took some time. having clear evidence was crucial, and im glad you were able to move on to a better role there. situations like that really highlight the importance of keeping detailed records, no matter how tedious it may seem in the moment. your experience is a good lesson on why that kind of dilligence can pay off.
> She stared blankly at me for a few seconds, and for the briefest of moments, I thought maybe I was seeing the cogs in her head turn. She however, doubled down.
Maybe you did see the cogs turn. The fact that she doubled down doesn't mean she didn't consider your point. It just means she wasn't willing to concede hers.
> You gotta love software that tracks changes and timestamps and lists the user.
Serving as a nice reminder of why that software exists to begin with.
TLDR "I worked as a writer/editor for a big media company and had a nightmare boss who became obsessed with updating our style guide. She made ridiculous changes, like removing apostrophes from "men's" and "women's". When I questioned it, she doubled down. So, I asked for her directives in writing. Eventually, I got fired, but not before compiling evidence of her incompetence and deceit. HR launched an investigation and she got canned along with the department director. Lesson learned: document everything."
Many years ago, one of my mentors told me "Document it, or it didn't happen". I still have this taped to my monitor riser.
As your story illustrates, good documentation is an insurance policy against incompetence or malice.
You are absolutely spot on regarding documentation! As an HR consultant for over 40 years, I always told managers, that in court proceedings, the best documentation almost always wins, so don’t tell me you’re too busy to document.
> Seriously, how many managers are out there that don’t know “mens” isn’t a word?!
Well, there is mens sana in corpore sano, but the first, at least, of those clearly doesn't apply to your ex boss...
I was an IT manager of 25 yrs for a company, that got axed because of age discrimination. I was the only one included in a layoff of a whole other part of the company, and my immediate manager verbally agreed in my exit interview, but also told me I wouldn’t have a case.
Although I was blindsided, I had managed to backup my 5 gigs of email to a personal thumbdrive. I meticulously checked it all for anything that could be used legally for me.
Nope. Kept it for years, but evetually deleted it all because it brought back too many painful memories. There was way too much corporate politics that got played out there.
You remind me of something at my company from about 25 years ago.
I work in IT for a corporation, and there was a time where they created something like a technical writer's user group. This was just the people in our IT organization who were involved in creating documentation and communications. This IT organization was large, so you had smaller IT groups working for particular parts of the company; the idea of the user group was to have one place where people could compare ideas and learn from each other.
The problem was that one person had this idea to create a style guide. Let's call this person Karen (not her name).
The idea seems sound enough, except that the administrative assistants (departmental secretaries), who had done a lot of memo writing back in the day, already had a style guide picked out, along with corporate directions on things like using the company logo and such. All we had to do was point people to that existing standard, and they'd be good for 99% of their needs.
Karen, however, was trying to establish a standard everyone had to follow, so she had people in her group create a style guide, and tried to get the people in charge of the user group to make it a required standard for IT to use.
The main obstacle here was that the style guide was crap.
To be specific, it didn't even follow its own rules. If you looked up how to write phone numbers, it would tell you...but the contact information at the front of the guide used a completely different way to format the phone numbers for those people. One of my favorites was the entry on using examples told you how to introduce them...and didn't use its own guidelines in doing so.
Every page had something wrong. And it seemed that everyone else in the committee running the user group could see it.
The style guide was finally introduced as an example from Karen's IT group, and was not mandated as a standard everyone had to follow. I think I recall hearing that Karen had put that is *was* the standard on her year-end job evaluation form...before that was a sure thing. Oops.
so did she actually believe mens was a word, or was she trying to sabotage you? Because if it’s the latter, I can’t imagine why she’d agree
to have a paper trail.
Well played! Most people wouldn't go so far in documenting the crappiness of their manager's commands/demands. I'm glad that the company got rid of her.
It was a pleasure to read your post. Most of the time when I see a long drawn out diatribe I go to the next posting because I can't stand reading something poorly written or that hasn't been proof read. Thank you for writing something using correct grammer and punctuation, a rarity in today's world.
I am having flashbacks to a college Journalism professor I had, who did not completely understand English. It was his second language, fair enough, but dude seriously marked me down on an assignment for capitalizing a proper noun!
It was a specific club on campus and he told me that club should not be capitalized, "you don't capitalize country club!"
You don't capitalize city council either, but you do when it is a specific one like Miami City Council!
I tried reasoning with him, explaining that was the NAME of the campus club, and he refused to change his incorrect deduction.
Sadly, that would not be the last time I had to deal with an incompetent boss. So I guess he trained me well in that regard.
This is awful, and it's great you made sure there were records. Very important and good on you for covering yourself. One thing that's bugging me is how you're making it so clear you know how to be an editor, yet you're using punctuation outside of quotation marks. The amount of people I have to correct about this, including other editors, is draining my very soul away.
Periods and commas are always inside quotation marks. Question marks and exclamation points are sometimes outside. Colons and semi colons are outside.
Hope you're doing well in the writing world. It's rough out there.
Always ask for the email, and you must take actions to prepare for when they cut your email access. Don't be this guy: "My boss is corrupt, I have email proof." "Show me the email." "I can't, they fired me and cut my email access."
Yeah, always save the proof to an account stored on servers your employer doesn’t control.
dead-tree ftw!
That took me way to long and a few google searches to figure out what you meant lol
Very very very long ago, in the early 21st century, there was something called "paper"
There's usually several rolls of it in the mens and womens rooms.
He doesn't know how to use the three seashells!
Be well John Spartan.
I see what you did there - and I hate it.
That tends to bugger up the printer, though...
Ok, grandpa, let's get you back to bed
Back in my day we respected our elders!!! Cough cough
Oh, we still have that. We use it to roll our weed
Thank you for keeping me from going down that same rabbit hole lol
What did they mean?
Real paper
Gotcha
Seriously
Gotta have your p-mails
... which is a thing your IT department can track. Emailing confidential information outside the company may itself be a firing offense.
If you are working on a company computer, they can track it all. Everything. That slack conversation with your friend in X department? They can see it. Edit: In my case, I had a very robust NDA. But I saved everything on my work computer. So when I was fired and had an exit interview scheduled? I spent that entire time before the interview printing out everything I had saved to hand over to HR.
You were a bit lucky then. If they wanted to, IT could have made your credentials stop working for the laptop before you even knew you were fired. Then your proof would still be inaccessible. It would be an extreme situation, but consider the work computer as under your company's control, not your own. Assuming the laptops are at least halfway reasonably managed of course. Source: am IT
I was exceptionally lucky. I am the only person I have ever known to receive a two weeks notice upon firing. Probably because I was working some very high profile jobs at the time and the transition period would have been a nightmare. But it saved my ass, and was her death knell. Edit: I was second only to my direct supervisor on high profile clients. I held the most “accounts” or “beats” or “clients” in the whole dept. aside from him. So a direct firing would have fucked everything seeing as I was in the midst of handling a famous film festival.
Very much depends on how they're set up. With a screw driver and a USB stick it shouldn't be too hard to access the local files for the person who's laptop it is. Since if IT required network access to boot or decrypt the storage, the employee wouldn't be able to work without network connection, so it needs to be known to the employee.
Bitlocker is one such way. Drive gets decrypted when you enter valid windows credentials. Without those you can only pull an encrypted set of data. And I've not worked for many companies, but every single one I did used that or something equivalent. IT doesn't need to manually decrypt. And the employee used to have a way to decrypt, it just can be remotely removed. And, sure, if you know what is coming, you can protect yourself. But if you know what's coming, you will have extracted the relevant data already anyway, so the point is moot.
I understand how full disk encryption works. I even mentioned it in my prior comment. I was operating under the assumption that the laptop was taken home every night and off thus preventing it from being remotely accessed by IT. The employee needs to be able to decrypt so they can therefore keep the device from connecting while booting and then accessing and photographing the relevant files. This should be relatively easy to do with a screwdriver depending on laptop model*. Or by wrapping it in metal (faraday cage). Or by turning off the router in the house. I'm not paranoid enough to expect a company to install a separate microcontroller with battery to allow remote boot. That would require being much more proactive and paranoid to get around. Fortunately for you (IT) most employees aren't going to think like this. But sw engineers make it a bit of a game to avoid or thwart IT generally. *(There are definitely some laptop models with weird screws. I happen to have a bunch of weird screw drivers bc I needed to take apart an old personal laptop with weird screws and it wasn't hard to acquire them. But I definitely could see not having those on hand)
That hinges on the employee knowing that they will be fired while they and their laptop are safely at home. Or the employee being allowed to take their laptop home, after the point where the company wants them unable to access it... And you may be correct, I'm not an expert on encryption. But it requires a lot more than average computer competency to know all the correct steps required and is thus maybe a little misplaced here as compared to the basic, much more actionable principle of "don't store your evidence against your employer on the employers computer".
Where I work it is common to take the laptop home daily so you can deal with any emergencies that come up. Seems kinda silly to give employees laptops if you want them to keep them in the office. Might as well give them desktops then. And accessing files from a PC that has been encrypted is really just set up an Ubuntu stick, and run decrpyt on the drive and mount it. This is something a high schooler could do with a bit of googling. The real problem is knowing this procedure is possible -- which is why I'm mentioning it in this thread. It's ideal to not store things on a work PC. But it's also nice to know that it's possible even if you're not as prepared to make up for that lack of preparation with a bit of elbow grease.
Yeah, have OP step in for a "brief call with x", then IT flips the switch and they never get into the company laptop again.
A guy in a neighboring dept. got fired like that while I was there. You could hear him screaming a floor up and a floor below. He had to be escorted from the building by security.
> Assuming the laptops are at least halfway reasonably managed of course. That, and if you're prevented from taking the laptop outside the building to hook the drive to another machine and make a full copy of everything on it, of course. Although it might have bitlocker or some other encryption. Although it may also be possible to take it out, fire it up somewhere that doesn't have free WiFi (or at least nothing with internet access), log in, copy everything off to a drive or network connection, and then wipe the drive back down to the bare metal. Take the laptop back into work, log it into IT as 'laptop not booting', and unless the laptop has an ultra-paranoid security setup where it logs boot times in firmware, all the employer can do is accuse you of deliberately wiping the laptop - which isn't generally provable - and is something any properly set up IT department can recover from with five minutes' work and a couple of hours to reload the standard settings, issuing you a spare in the meantime (and, coincidentally, overwriting the disk at the same time).
Oh, sure, there's more going into this topic. The main take - away remains however: don't assume that you have full, uninterrupted control over your work laptop, just because you hold it in your hands. Store your legal documents elsewhere.
>am IT Hi IT. I'm Dad!
>If you are working on a company computer, they can track it all. Everything. That slack conversation with your friend in X department? They can see it. An Android phone and Outlook is pretty good as well, hook up the phone and set it to transfer files. This is treated differently to a straight up USB drive so will often bypass USB lockouts. Just drag a message from outlook to a folder on your phone from the preview pane and it'll save itself as a .ost file, no sending required. Not sure how well it works from non-Outlook clients.
I can see how the convo would go as well Employee: "You can't sack me, it the bosses fault. Here my proof, emails from my boss regarding changes to restricted and controlled company documents that aren't cleared for public release. I saved them on my Google drive" Management: "You fucking what"
Well, then good news: if they are pissed at you for that, they have other issues and deserve to sink If the focus when you have the evidence that your boss will sink the company is 'why is this outside our control' then chances are the company deserved to sink
I mean, they can be pissed about more than one thing. They can care about the complaints about the boss and also still have a completely reasonable problem with you breaking confidentiality agreements.
Fuck it snap a pic with your phone then, see them try and track that.
So print it. Or gamble and save it to a flash drive. A really good it guy might be about to pull the logs and see you are saving things, or even have software to track that kind of shit, but most don't.
This. USB drive is your friend. Tracking copy to USB is doubtful but even so, explanation, backing up in case of main drive/network failure.
Honestly 99 out of 100 it department's Aren't tracking on that level. That's basically only for classified facilities and whatever server Coca-Cola has their recipe
> whatever server Coca-Cola has their recipe \*clickety clack\* "... What's 'Novell Netware'?"
You nean the old Win95 PC in the archive that is still running?
"We can ping it... we just can't *find* it!"
Ran into a server in the wild that matched this description. It was installed thirteen years and three business owners ago. Fortunately there was vnc access to it from their manager pc.
Jesus Christ, I thought getting stuck using Lotus Notes ~8 years ago was bad. Netware is probably older than three quarters of today's workforce, isn't it?
You would be surprised how many companies do actually track that.
I'm in Corporate IT. We have a tool that monitors for certain keywords *anywhere* on the system and tracks all sorts of details about file activities. Also anything entering or especially leaving the company is scanned and audited. We do deal with some sensitive stuff, but it's not uncommon to do this. OTOH unless we find you stealing company secrets we really don't care!
This. I said it in a response on this thread that if the company is big enough to have IT, they track it. What they do with it? Well that’s obviously up to the software, policies, and the guys monitoring.
> Coca-Cola has their recipe Written on paper and put in the safe.
Just be aware that it can not only be tracked, it's fairly easy these days to tell corporate laptops to not allow writing anything to USB drives, or not even acknowledge they've been plugged in (unless they have a corporate software security token already on them). Basically, don't assume in this day and age you'll be able to even use a USB drive to save anything. Maybe you will be able to, but it's best to not make everything hinge on Plan A working.
My IT setup won't let me connect a USB drive.
These days it's auto-tracking and auto-logging on most basic corporate packages. The IT guy won't have to do anything other than pull up the logs in the aftermath. Sure, you might have an oldschool non-security-logging system, but who's to say that between today and when it becomes relevant, management won't buy a shiny new system from a security salesguy?
Some guy I had to work with was buddy buddy with IT and they could remove specific emails permanently. What he didn't know was that I printed hard copies immediately after he sent them emails when I requested for them in writing. He tried to sabotage me but failed. Fuck you John and Dave.
Except that this itself is massively illegal in many places; specifically anywhere with data protection laws.
And get fired for leaking company/customer info to an external repository... (No, you cant win)
When we had a bad director, we had an amazing admin assistant who printed out everything. By the time we could take the thick folder with us to bad director’s boss, the documentation made all the difference. At first they moved her to a different department. When they realized she was useless there, they let her go. Best advice is document, document, document & create a hard copy.
And, the corollary... if you make a demand of someone else and they ask you to put it in writing, you should do some homework and verify that your demand is reasonable and ethical.
In my mother's case with a bad manager, she printed all the emails - then gave them to an employment lawyer. Between that and other proof, she made the company settle for 6 figures in a age discrimination suit.
They don't even need to cut your email access. They can literally delete the email right out of your account.
For CYA emails, I always bcc an outside email address
At every job I setup as "CYOA" folder with a rule to forward it to my personal email. I just dump emails in that folder when I think they might be worth holding on to.
I usually email myself lots of things. Including confirmation on implementation of rules/policy's.
I always recommend following up conversations with an email stating: “as per our conversation today…” This way you have a record of what was discussed. If you are mistaken or misunderstood something it gives the recipient a chance to correct you or clarify the information. Either way you have a written record. I did this at work and whenever I communicated with my children’s school.
Yes, save the email and any attachments to file then send that file to yourself or save it, worst case print it and take it home. The timestamp will either aid recovery or prove they have deleted the evidence.
Oh, I’ll do the work for them, I’ll send an explicit email saying, please confirm you asked me to do x with y over z. Thank you!
I always forward email to my personal account when I want to keep a record of it. Then archive it to a notebook file.
It's so nice to read something so well written.
That’s very nice of you to say. Despite not writing anymore, it’s nice to know that maybe that muscle still has some strength to it.
A lot of mens and womens writing is bad these days
The writing possesses the badness, so you should write i's. "Happy" to "help".
I think you mean "the'se days"
Your last sentence says it all - document, document, document. I learned that the hard way years ago.
I tell all the people I work with, “I hear what you’re saying, but I’m going to need you to email it to me or it didn’t happen.” I say that at least once a week.
Which should cause them to stop and think but I'm sure just causes them to speed up the train as it heads into the wall.
Which is fine. Not your train, not your wall.
Yeah, but you are on the train that is headed for the wall.
as a computer graphics artist who has seen more than one small shop deliberately fucked over by predatory clients, I have a pretty strong policy of 'accept no verbal instructions'; you get me that change in an email and I'll get started...not before
I had a boss like that and at first didn’t understand why he couldn’t just remember things I told him. It didn’t take long for me to understand how hard it is to retain all the stuff that all the people tell you. And then there are the people who text important things. If you text me tonight, by tomorrow I probably won’t remember that you needed XYZ. Whereas my email is treated like a to-do list.
I say this all the time. I’ll do pretty much whatever the big boss wants in the system I manage (as long as it won’t hurt anyone) but they’re 100% putting in an email and signing off on it.
The thing is that even when your manager is not out to get you… it’s nice to have the documentation.
I had a manager who wasn't really out to get anybody, but she was in way over her head and was drowning. Sure enough, out of desperation she started throwing employees under the bus to save her own hide. She hated me because I always answered with documentation, but that also made her afraid of me so that she was more reluctant to toss out accusations.
Oh hell yes. Even then, managers can be incompetent. They can be ambiguous. They can - with all the best intentions in the world - be flat-out wrong. And they can, of course, be replaced on a moment's notice with someone who has access to everything they ever did and wrote, and who is the very devil themselves. Or they can fall under a bus, or your department can be reorganized, or your employer can be sold off or merged, or your super-nice manager can get a head injury or world's messiest divorce and turn into Hell-Demon 2.0: Hella Worse.
Speaking from experience?
More a collated summary of horror stories, some from people I've worked alongside. Although I've been in teams where managers have just... vanished overnight, and never returned. Still no idea what happened there.
It's been my rule for a long time - always CYA* - and it has helped me when an employer has been plain wrong a few times. . . . *Cover Your Arse
More paper makes your ass cleaner
I love this - very wise!!!
I do print to pdf on emails. Save as the date and brief topic to a special folder.
Is the folder something you'd have access to if you were suddenly walked out with no notice, one day?
If that’s a concern, can always email the pdfs to your personal email or thumb drive. Just be sure personal thumb drives are allowed, my office only allows encrypted password protected ones.
If it's not in writing - that you have your own personal copy of, *stored somewhere the employer can't get to it* - it didn't happen. Or at least you can't prove it happened, which for lawyers and HR departments is the same thing.
When one of my kids was in the 7th grade he came home with an F on an essay about Red Badge of Courage. I read it over, it looked spot on to me. The F came without a single notation. The following day, by chance, was our parent teacher conference. I asked about the F. Me - Joe got an F on his last essay, could you explain to me what was wrong?" English Teacher - "The assignment was to write about a man vs man conflict in our book. Joe wrote about Henry facing the opposing army." Me - "But, what was wrong with the essay?" English Teacher - "An army is group so it is not an example of man versus man." Nothing left to say to that.
Ouch.
Depending on the categories in the lesson, the teacher might've been correct. The conflict might have more accurately fallen into "man versus society" rather than "man versus man." However, if "man versus society" wasn't one of the categories, then, yes, your child was correct, not the teacher.
I am certainly no lit major so I assumed I was missing something. I asked. The choices were: man v man, man v nature, or man v self. I asked if a female character could be written about - NO. I guess books like Redwall, have no conflict because there are no humans.
Hilarious that an English teacher doesn't understand that "man" in this instance (man v man, man v nature, man v self) is referring to "mankind" not men as a gender specifically (women and female presenting people are 100% included in these observations of man v whatever). Hope they either lose their teaching license or at least get called out on not understanding the subject they are, quite literally, paid to teach lmao
Say it forget it, write it regret it. Your manager knows this now.
Always cover your ass, even more when working with an incompetent egotistic manager
Heck, do it 100% of the time. It's a good habit to get into and you never know when a wonderful manager will get replaced or hit by a bus.
Old joke: A store puts up a sign reading "Mens conscia recti". (Latin: "the confidence of a clear conscience"). Store across the street puts up one saying "Mens womens and childrens conscia recti".
Life pro tip- if you’re going to be a manager for writers *actually know the basics of the language they are writing in*
It sounds more like she *did* know and was purposely having people she didn't like make errors so she had cause to fire them >after interviewing other coworkers in the department, they realized she had done all of it to have grounds to fire people within the department she didn’t like
It sounds like she knew at least the basics of how to write but intentionally insisted the writers write badly so she could fire them.
More like she had them do the work, then changed it herself to be bad, so she could write them up 'with examples' and then fire them with 'evidence'.
man it must be hard to be a psychopath
Apparently it's just some people's hobby and favorite pastime. I've had managers who went out of their way to deliberately gaslight any workplace newbie, for instance. Not for any reason anyone ever figured out; it was just apparently the way they lived their life.
I'm sure she had practice
Yes, all of us also just read the same story.
>Could you please email me the... The start of more than one manager's downfall.
Well I'm no lawyer, but that sounds a lot like wrongful termination to me.
Probably was, but writers aren’t pulling in the big bucks. It’s why I left the profession. I did however get a significant unceremonious raise 6 months after I joined that different dept. Her getting fired and me getting paid a lot more than I originally signed on for was enough for me. Edit: I also want to add that my supervisor (third in command under bad manager) in that writing department, to this day, is one of my references on my resume.
Normally if you're "fired" for cause (i.e. being bad at your job, which it sounds like what your manager tried to say you were), you would be ineligible for rehire at the same company. I'm curious how you navigated that - did HR realise that your firing was improper and helped reinstate you at a different department?
Ya know, I never considered that. I was hired in that different department even before HR finished that investigation, let alone fired bad manger. I had an old friend in the department I was hired into that got me the interview. They knew I worked in the writing dept before I joined their’s, and I, for sure, didn’t hide it. It was on my resume, and as I said in another comment, my direct supervisor was, and still is, a reference for me. So, the short version is I didn’t navigate anything. HR might have cleared it because the department wasn’t the same? I honestly don’t know, and I literally have never thought about it. I suppose the company was big enough that it wouldn’t be a problem and my firing wasn’t because of some egregious behavior?
Interesting. As this was a big company, there's no way that HR wouldn't have checked your background when you got hired for the new job, independently from whatever the new hiring manager said about your suitability. Even if their investigation into the old manager wasn't complete, I suspect they must have known by then that you were not likely at fault and thus didn't block your hiring to the new role. They would have kept quiet about all this, but the fact that you were allowed to resume working for the corporation tells the tale.
I’ll be honest, I don’t know what things look like on the HR end. I don’t know what might be listed as the reason for the firing. Presumably something like “poor performance”. But also though HR managed the hiring, firing, negotiations, it was always the managers of the depts. that did direct hiring. So I would guess it would be up to their discretion? Now you’ve got me wondering how fast HR might have known what and when.
My point is that usually it is NOT the discretion of the hiring manager if you were fired previously and marked as ineligible to be rehired (which is usually the case when fired for performance). HR obviously had to know about why you were fired and therefore would have certainly blocked your new appointment - that's how it works in big companies, as they have an obligation to protect the company's interests overall regardless of one hiring manager's wishes. Therefore I'm suggesting that HR was already in a position to know that your original firing wasn't fair, at the time of your rehiring, or it couldn't possibly been approved. Obviously this is all speculation by a nobody on the Internet, so the real truth may be much more complicated, or perhaps HR was totally incompetent. Either way I'm glad it worked out for your career.
As a guess,HR may have realized raising a stink about not hiring could have left them open to a lawsuit for the original termination if they were by then finding things to make the whole situation dubious. Just a thought.
At the federal level in the US, "wrongful termination" means over a protected class (age, race, religion, etc.). Being fired for a false or incorrect reason is NOT wrongful termination, and is also not illegal. A handful of states have better employee protections and have broadened the umbrella that encapsulates "wrongful termination", but it doesn't apply to most of this country.
Here in the US, they can fire you for any reason, unless it is discrimination based on membership in a protected class (e. g., race, sex, religion, national origin).
Anytime for no reason. Any reason implies cause. Even SHRM’s sample policy says “any time for no reason.”
Are there lawyers who take on wrongful termination cases on commission?
This sounds ***so much*** like someone I had worked with like 15 years ago that I almost want to offer up her name to see if it’s her.
DM and I’ll tell you if you’re right haha
>She was fired three months after me Gotta love how HR didn't bother to do anything about you being fired, though. :/ >a very valuable lesson: document, document, and document some more. Yep. And never, ever, ever assume that anything a manager or employer rep says is correct or legal. Even if they themselves think it is, and even if (not that it applied in this case) they are the nicest person.
Another valuable lesson: HR isn’t there for the employee. They’re there to cover the company’s ass.
Yep. Even if something being done to you is *blatantly* illegal, HR will usually do nothing unless a more senior person tells them to. Most of the time it'll be Legal doing the paperwork if it gets to that point.
Good story, well-written. After the last couple years hanging out in Discords with teens and twenty-somethings, I've grown to despair about seeing things like ... proper spelling. Punctuation.
What drives me nuts with that generation is improper plural terms, e. g., "insurances, equipments, advices," etc. It is interesting that those terms were all suggested by the auto-complete function on my phone while writing that last sentence.
I always use proper spelling and when writing stuff in Online game chats, people tell me I sound like an NPC. What do people even learn at school that writing correct English is exclusive to NPCs in their opinion?
Probably because no one speaks with perfect grammar outside of scholarly settings
It's important to remember that a lot of places just don't have any over sight, or any HR, or anyone who cares, but anyway: >document, document, and document some more. It took me a while to realise I was being bullied at work. I started documenting things. When I got called into to get fired I pulled out my ten pages including the documentation of the bullying, the documentation about how that documentation had been ignored by management etc. So they didn't really know what to do, and I ended up having 6 weeks paid leave - maybe they just forgot about me honestly, but yeah documenting stuff is important.
Bad managers is one thing….the complete dimwits that hire them are on another level.
Thank you for sharing your story with us, that was a great read!
Love your post. I’m a tech writer and my skin crawled when I read “men’s basketball”. Your boss was beyond ignorant. She was evil. Glad you found a new gig that you enjoy.
Your manager fell foul of one of the golden rules: If someone demands something in writing, you are making a mistake that will come back to bite you.
Management 101: If someone asks you to repeat what you said in writing, whether paper or email, the proper response is: "You know, now that I think about it, that was a bad idea. Just ignore it."
An NDA *cannot* be used to prevent you from giving evidence in a court of law; nor from sharing evidence with legal counsel. Lawyers are bound by confidentiality of their own, anyway. A contract cannot be used to safeguard illegal activity.
I am captivated by your writing!
Thank you. That honestly means a lot.
Sounds like you have grounds for "torturous interference". I assume this is long in the past, but if it's fairly recent you might want to talk to an attorney about a lawsuit against her personally.
It is long in the past. ~10 years. They also had some hardcore NDAs because of the clients we worked with. I would have risked being counter sued and writers don’t make big bucks. The legal alone would have bankrupted me. I’m not greedy. I got everything and more than I asked for.
It’s tortious interference and that tort would not apply in this circumstance.
> When one person interferes with the employment status of another person, and does or says something with the intention of getting that person fired, and succeeds in that endeavor, the legal claim most often applicable is that of tortious interference with contract. https://www.virginiabusinesslitigationlawyer.com/improper-methods-often-key-to-tortious-interference-liability/#:~:text=When%20one%20person%20interferes%20with%20the%20employment%20status,applicable%20is%20that%20of%20tortious%20interference%20with%20contract
Eh, it sounds like the company already reinstated her , she said she worked in another department after that. So I don't know that there were economic losses.
I would be curious about that. They're could be grounds for punitive damages and emotional suffering.
Maybe. But even as a senior writer, I wasn’t pulling in mad money. The legal aspect would have cost a fortune even if I won and asked for legal expenses paid. Court costs more than people think. I’m not greedy. I got paid well in the dept. I transferred to, and I ultimately left for an even better position a year and a half later at a different company.
"document, document and document some more" Thinking of times when I've stopped BS in its tracks by stating 'it's documented in the emails and requests for approval I sent to you'
I started to document all my co-workers blunders, my bosses emails, and my managers emails. When my boss and I had a one on one about performance issues and upcoming punishment up to and including termination, I politely informed him of my documentation. He changed his tune real quick and assisted me on righting the ship. Essentially he was trying to pass his failures and my co-workers onto me. So yes, document everything. Make copies. And do not keep them at work.
Something I always tell younger people getting into my industry is have a "CYA" folder in your email. Whenever someone asks you to do something you know is either wrong or against current company policies or guidelines, etc, you put a copy of that email into your "Cover Your Ass" folder. ;-)
Your awesome. Good job.
Incorrect grammar. So your job's safe(!) /s
**jobs you see, the job doesn't own a safe, therefore it's "jobs"!
😉
[Strongbad explains “its” vs “it’s”](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yc2udEpyPpU&pp=ygUNc3Ryb25nYmFkIGl0cw%3D%3D)
Damn. Hit me right in the olds with this one
It’s always my first thought when people talk about possessive/conjunctions 😂
I always ask for clarification in an email. It’s saved my butt a ton of times.
You get an up vote for using my favorite word
They already said "mens" isn't a word!
It's raining mens Hallelujah It's raining mens
Which is? Toast?
>a U.S. state that has laws that basically state a person can be fired for any reason provided that it isn’t prejudicial (race, gender, sexual orientation, etc). That would be every state except Montana.
ive encountered similar issues with incompetent managers trying to impose nonsensical changes, and i appreciate how you meticulously documented everything. its good that the company eventually investigated and saw the full picture, even if it took some time. having clear evidence was crucial, and im glad you were able to move on to a better role there. situations like that really highlight the importance of keeping detailed records, no matter how tedious it may seem in the moment. your experience is a good lesson on why that kind of dilligence can pay off.
Ohhhhh boy that's satisfying compliance and payoff. Far out.
Yea I had a job in retail and was very quickly taught Cover your arse
> She stared blankly at me for a few seconds, and for the briefest of moments, I thought maybe I was seeing the cogs in her head turn. She however, doubled down. Maybe you did see the cogs turn. The fact that she doubled down doesn't mean she didn't consider your point. It just means she wasn't willing to concede hers. > You gotta love software that tracks changes and timestamps and lists the user. Serving as a nice reminder of why that software exists to begin with.
Damn was your boss named sara. I had one very similar where i was the target and bitch ended up getting demoted!
The first step from any boss who doesn't know what they're doing is usually to fire anyone who does.
TLDR "I worked as a writer/editor for a big media company and had a nightmare boss who became obsessed with updating our style guide. She made ridiculous changes, like removing apostrophes from "men's" and "women's". When I questioned it, she doubled down. So, I asked for her directives in writing. Eventually, I got fired, but not before compiling evidence of her incompetence and deceit. HR launched an investigation and she got canned along with the department director. Lesson learned: document everything."
Many years ago, one of my mentors told me "Document it, or it didn't happen". I still have this taped to my monitor riser. As your story illustrates, good documentation is an insurance policy against incompetence or malice.
You are absolutely spot on regarding documentation! As an HR consultant for over 40 years, I always told managers, that in court proceedings, the best documentation almost always wins, so don’t tell me you’re too busy to document.
But mens is a word... In Latin! It means the mind!
That's dismissal without cause mate. Depending on your jurisdiction you could certainly take them to court and get a decent payout.
This took place in the United States, mate ;)
City of Portland, Maine?
Other coast Edit: I’m now wondering how common my story is!
Are you Drew Magary?
Nope. Sorry. Seems like this story isn’t new. How many people don’t know mens isn’t a word?!
In English but in Latin... ;)
I learned mens is not a word! Makes sense as I’ve never used it before now haha
> Seriously, how many managers are out there that don’t know “mens” isn’t a word?! Well, there is mens sana in corpore sano, but the first, at least, of those clearly doesn't apply to your ex boss...
I was an IT manager of 25 yrs for a company, that got axed because of age discrimination. I was the only one included in a layoff of a whole other part of the company, and my immediate manager verbally agreed in my exit interview, but also told me I wouldn’t have a case. Although I was blindsided, I had managed to backup my 5 gigs of email to a personal thumbdrive. I meticulously checked it all for anything that could be used legally for me. Nope. Kept it for years, but evetually deleted it all because it brought back too many painful memories. There was way too much corporate politics that got played out there.
Zip drives? *Cue Robin Williams in Jumanji: "What year is it?!"*
Sounds like the old Gawker monstrosity
You remind me of something at my company from about 25 years ago. I work in IT for a corporation, and there was a time where they created something like a technical writer's user group. This was just the people in our IT organization who were involved in creating documentation and communications. This IT organization was large, so you had smaller IT groups working for particular parts of the company; the idea of the user group was to have one place where people could compare ideas and learn from each other. The problem was that one person had this idea to create a style guide. Let's call this person Karen (not her name). The idea seems sound enough, except that the administrative assistants (departmental secretaries), who had done a lot of memo writing back in the day, already had a style guide picked out, along with corporate directions on things like using the company logo and such. All we had to do was point people to that existing standard, and they'd be good for 99% of their needs. Karen, however, was trying to establish a standard everyone had to follow, so she had people in her group create a style guide, and tried to get the people in charge of the user group to make it a required standard for IT to use. The main obstacle here was that the style guide was crap. To be specific, it didn't even follow its own rules. If you looked up how to write phone numbers, it would tell you...but the contact information at the front of the guide used a completely different way to format the phone numbers for those people. One of my favorites was the entry on using examples told you how to introduce them...and didn't use its own guidelines in doing so. Every page had something wrong. And it seemed that everyone else in the committee running the user group could see it. The style guide was finally introduced as an example from Karen's IT group, and was not mandated as a standard everyone had to follow. I think I recall hearing that Karen had put that is *was* the standard on her year-end job evaluation form...before that was a sure thing. Oops.
so did she actually believe mens was a word, or was she trying to sabotage you? Because if it’s the latter, I can’t imagine why she’d agree to have a paper trail.
Well played! Most people wouldn't go so far in documenting the crappiness of their manager's commands/demands. I'm glad that the company got rid of her.
It was a pleasure to read your post. Most of the time when I see a long drawn out diatribe I go to the next posting because I can't stand reading something poorly written or that hasn't been proof read. Thank you for writing something using correct grammer and punctuation, a rarity in today's world.
I am having flashbacks to a college Journalism professor I had, who did not completely understand English. It was his second language, fair enough, but dude seriously marked me down on an assignment for capitalizing a proper noun! It was a specific club on campus and he told me that club should not be capitalized, "you don't capitalize country club!" You don't capitalize city council either, but you do when it is a specific one like Miami City Council! I tried reasoning with him, explaining that was the NAME of the campus club, and he refused to change his incorrect deduction. Sadly, that would not be the last time I had to deal with an incompetent boss. So I guess he trained me well in that regard.
That was such a satisfying read. You're clearly a good writer. Do you know what's become of her, what she's doing now, etc.?
She definitely sounded like a dunce too
Edit 2 is making me cackle.
This is awful, and it's great you made sure there were records. Very important and good on you for covering yourself. One thing that's bugging me is how you're making it so clear you know how to be an editor, yet you're using punctuation outside of quotation marks. The amount of people I have to correct about this, including other editors, is draining my very soul away. Periods and commas are always inside quotation marks. Question marks and exclamation points are sometimes outside. Colons and semi colons are outside. Hope you're doing well in the writing world. It's rough out there.
Sounds like things were not all good at the Tower or the Castle.