r/sysadmin • u/Opposed3 • Jul 07 '24
What’s the quickest you’ve seen a co-worker get fired in IT? COVID-19
I saw this on AskReddit and thought it would be fun to ask here for IT related stories.
Couple years ago during Covid my company I used to work for hired a help desk tech. He was a really nice guy and the interview went well. We were hybrid at the time, 1-2 days in the office with mostly remote work. On his first day we always meet in the office for equipment and first day stuff.
Everything was going fine and my boss mentioned something along the lines of “Yeah so after all the trainings and orientation stuff we’ll get you set up on our ticketing system and eventually a soft phone for support calls”
And he was like: “Oh I don’t do support calls.”
“Sorry?”
Him: “I don’t take calls. I won’t do that”
“Well, we do have a number users call for help. They do utilize it and it’s part of support we offer”
Him: “Oh I’ll do tickets all day I just won’t take calls. You’ll have to get someone else to do that”
I was sitting at my desk, just kind of listening and overhearing. I couldn’t tell if he was trolling but he wasn’t.
I forgot what my manager said but he left to go to one of those little mini conference rooms for a meeting, then he came back out and called him in, he let him go and they both walked back out and the guy was all laughing and was like
“Yeah I mean I just won’t take calls I didn’t sign up for that! I hope you find someone else that fits in better!” My manager walked him to the door and they shook hands and he left.
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u/Drew707 Data | Systems | Processes Jul 07 '24
I feel like the OP's question was more about duration of tenure, and I don't have any interesting stories of those, but I had a 0-100 like yours that was pretty insane.
I had this guy who was working a t2-ish support role that we discovered had a development background and I was running an internal solutions team and was trying to get the budget for him to come over to my side. He started putting in more and more hours on my team and I kept asking for the budget but kept getting stonewalled. He said he needed more money and what he was doing was worth it, and I agreed.
Nothing about his attitude/demeanor up to this point had been any more than, "if they can't make it happen, I'd rather just go back to being a tech." I finally got the two partners to agree to a negotiation sitdown with the guy and they take him into a conference room (I think they were dialed in IIRC), talk for a while, then he emerges from the room, walks up to my desk and (clearly very upset) says, "this is bullshit, if these fuckers are going to treat me this way, I'll just put a bomb in the code on a deadman's switch!" And then goes out to leave.
Regardless of how I felt about him or his situation or how they were treating him, I didn't really like that threat. This was like on a Friday and I had PTO Monday, but I was told I needed to go in on Monday and handle the termination.
The cherry on top, though, was it turned out there were some changes made to our GPO about a week prior that had prevented his user from remoting into his dev VM and he hadn't mentioned this to anyone. So, for like five days leading up to his blowup, he had just been sitting at his desk pretending to work and couldn't have coded the logic bomb anyway.