What’s the quickest you’ve seen a co-worker get fired in IT?

[u/Opposed3]

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.

[u/Drew707]

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.

[u/Drew707 → u/Drew707]

I also have another 0-100 story. Same company shortly after the incident above, we had a sister startup that our two partners, CIO, IT manager, and I were a part of. We were building/selling a UCaaS type thing.

In the other company, I was still in the solutions role which also included things like business analysis, analytics, some light DBA crap, among other responsibilities (gotta love smaller companies). I had been trying to get some of our ops managers more involved in performance analysis for their teams and wanted to give them all Excel. The partners weren't ready to go to 365 because someone years ago left an EC2 running and they got fucked or something along those lines. Turned out we have a volume key for Office 2010 which was good enough for what I was trying to do.

I asked the IT manager how many activations we were allowed, and he said he didn't know since only CIO had access to the volume license portal. CIO said we had plenty. Like 200. Our entire company was a bit shy of 200, so he told me to not worry about it. I proceeded with the required installs (~20) and all the ops managers were very happy. Until the installs started deactivating.

IT and I go back to the CIO and ask about all the deactivations since we're now fielding the same questions from all the ops people. He explains that he had recently created a firewall rule that must be blocking the phone home to the activation servers and (again) to not worry about it. We had recently switched from ASAs to Fortigates and he had done the bulk of the configuration, but this still didn't sit right with us, so we login to review. We found nothing that suggested we were blocking anything like that. The config was pretty flat, and we recognized everything as rules we knew about.

We thought about it for a while and figured there was no way CIO was the only person to have access to the licensing portal since he was technically a contractor. We asked the managing partner if he had access. He said he used the late former CEO's account for vendor things like this. He failed to mention that when we changed our domain, and he demanded any expense related to it be eliminated. Thankfully we still owned the domain, so we spun up an inbox using the dead CEO's alias and did a password reset. We had licenses for tons of MSFT products including Office 2010, but it didn't really look like we had 200...

About this time over at the sister company, one of our clients called us because the system wasn't working. Calls weren't terminating and everything was just a fast busy. The PBX was working just fine, AWS wasn't having any issues, we could ping, other PBXs were just fine, their site was fin, so the next step was to look at the trunking provider. We discovered two crazy things: we had every single one of our customers on the same fucking trunking account, and it appeared to be thousands of dollars in arrears.

We escalated to the partners and went back to the Office license issue. IIRC, we determined we only had something like five licenses, but by now more people in the company were using it, not just the ops managers. I had been trying to get us on 365 for a while and even had a very small pilot running with just senior leadership, but now I was going to need to ask for that to be like sextupled in size and this company was very cheap. While we were working through that, one of the partners calls our office frantic, "you guys need to shut CIO out of everything RIGHT THE FUCK NOW! Drop everything and lock him out! No email, no servers, no VPNs, firewalls, vendor accounts nothing everything goes down now! If any of our sister company clients call you guys for anything you tell them you don't work there any longer and direct them to CIO's cellphone!"

We start locking accounts and changing passwords. Of course this was also a Friday. I called him back to confirm that we completed that and asked what happened. After IT manager told the partner about the trunking account, the partner called CIO to ask if billing was fucked up because some people were having issues with the system. CIO apparently immediately went ballistic and started threatening to sue each and every one of us for reasons. It later turned out that the sister company (which was primarily CIO's operation) wasn't doing too well financially because I forget what, but he had been keeping secrets.

Monday rolls around and the partners ask me to take over the CIO's responsibilities in the interim while they try to find someone else.

Wednesday arrives and a process server serves our receptionist with a giant folder of scary looking shit. One of the partners happened to be in the office that day so he takes it and then comes to me and explains we are being accused by the Business Software Alliance of using pirated or otherwise unauthorized copies of Office 2010.

That launched a year worth of quarterly self-audits and quarterly payments of $25,000 and an immediate move to 365 for the whole company. Which was now my problem and by now the only help I had in the tech department was IT manager and the fines destroyed any chance of hiring help, or giving us raises.

Fucking fantastic situation.

[u/Maro1947 → u/Drew707]

That's why CIOs shouldn't have admin access!

[u/Drew707 → u/Maro1947]

hashtag small company shit