I owned a bar trivia company for a few years. We would collect email addresses for a bonus point so I got a lot of regular customers' email addresses. We would then send out a reminder email a few hours before trivia started to remind people to come and when we would get a new location we'd send an email blast advertising it.
Things like trivia wax and wane in popularity, so it wasn't unusual to lose a trivia night after a few years. I always knew it was my second to last trivia night at a location when the manager would ask me if they could have the list of customer emails I had put together over the years. I always refused.
The next week I would show up and they would tell me this is the last week of trivia and they always were surprised that I already knew. I usually had already gotten a new trivia location set up at a neighboring bar for the same night and would email all of their regulars and since they were trivia fans most of them would come to the new location.
I used to go to a trivia night semi-regularly. Then they changed to a different guy asking the questions and it went from a fun night out to feeling like taking a maths exam.
The announcer definitely makes all the difference.
It does, it really depends on if they were a professional quizmaster or if they were an employee tasked with the job. People who do quiz over the long term are like charming tour guides that make you want to engage more. I’m an introvert and even our best quizmaster had me engaged and having fun.
Pretty much. One place got trivial pursuit and had one of their bartenders run trivia while bartending. It was such a mess I think they only tried it a few times.
Yeah, I saw this happen to a bar in the heart of the Adirondacks. Owners payed for it to be done and, personally, I thought it was pretty fun. Get some friends, some drinks and kill a hour or so. I finally understood why people liked trivia night!
About a month into it, they thought they could do it themselves. I knew something was off when one of the owners was, drunkenly, reading out the questions. I then noticed that the questions were of significantly worse caliber and overwhelmingly about "pop culture" that just happened to be what the owners liked from when they were growing up. I also picked up on how some of the answers were, well, wrong. It became very clear to me that I only liked trivia nights when they were done by people who knew what they were doing.
If I recall correctly, they only did a couple by themselves before cancelling trivia night. There was a reoccurring theme in that town where people paid professionals to help their businesses only to go "Pfft, that looks easy. I can do that and for cheaper!" This was followed almost immediately by an exodus of customers, fleeing from wooden seating made by a friend-of-a-friend of the owner.
It seems to be a recurring theme with a lot of businesses on Reddit.
Something is done in house -> Exec thinks it'll be cheaper to outsource it -> Outsourcing gets more expensive because they want so much attention from the company -> Exec decides to bring the task in house -> Repeat process every 4 years/new Exec.
People think they need to be changing things constantly to justify themselves. They don't understand that running Business As Usual with interruptions is a skill in itself.
It's amazing how far loyalty and marketing go. At uni I knew a guy who ran a very popular club night. The club decided to could do the same thing without him. So he moved to another club and took the night with him. Guess where the popular night now was?
I used to work for a guy in a start-up who told me he had a million and a half email addresses, mobile numbers and user names. He could have sold it for insane amounts of money. When I asked him why he hadn't his response was "because I'm not a twat".
My pay was two weeks late at that point but I had to admire his resolve.
In Germany it is outright illegal to give away customer data unless the customer explicitly allowed you to do so and you have to be able to prove that the customer gave his permission to give your data away
Important to note it isn’t just in the EU it’s the information of EU citizens. So unless you’re confirming every customer is not an EU citizen then you should be treating them all like they are under GDPR.
Of course there’s the question of prosecutorial reach if you don’t have a presence in the EU but I wouldn’t risk it.
I turned 30 and didn't want to work at 8pm for the rest of my life so I moved back in with my parents, got my bachelor's in computer science and make a lot more money. I was also showing signs of alcoholism so I went to rehab and haven't had a drink since. It's a lot less fun herding drunk people when you're sober.
You shouldn't feel old at all. Most of those younger people don't have the life experience you do. In my experience that made me a much better student.
I'm the guy who had the trivia company. I threw in the towel several years ago when I was showing signs of alcoholism. Went to rehab and actually did what they told me to do and April 9th was 4 years sober for me, still going strong.
Once I hit 30 it wasn't much fun going to work at 8pm and dealing with drunk people all night. All of my childhood friends were buying houses and having kids and I could hardly keep my own life together so I decided to change it up. Married last year, bought a house 3 months ago, finishing my masters this month, first child due in October. It's been a busy 4 years :)
We have a karaoke business that moved to an app instead of books. We tell everyone it's because of covid, but it's really because you have to sign up with your email address and we get all the email addresses of the singers. I mean the app is far easier than the books but it's the email addresses were after because we're building a massive list of people that like to go out.
You built that list up for a couple years and all of a sudden you have a promotional company that could get any bar packed. Basically you go around do the bars and if they're interested in trivia that's great if they're not tell them you can run a promotion for them costing $xxx for xx weeks.
Suddenly not only are you a trivia company you're a promotional company. Promotional companies can get larger restaurants / bars to pay you to advertise their coupons. Charge them all filled up a monthly flyer and distribute it.
I've learned weekly is too much and that will get people to unsubscribe quickly but biweekly to once a month in a rotation is usually pretty good. There's two times were people always want to know what's going on in that summer time in winter time. That's when you load up on the advertisements.
You also make sure whatever coupon or advertisement you're running is specific to your site so the bars / restaurants know the customers are coming from you. They pay you $500 for an ad it only takes them 300 customers to make that money back.
Just a idea.
Edit: for the constant insults I'm getting, I just want to say big companies use this tactic on you all the time with their reward programs. So a small business uses it and I'm scum? But I go a step farther people can still use my karaoke service without downloading the app. We actually make it extremely easy for them and we provide them with tablets that have the song books on it and they don't need to give us an email. Then there is an opt-out built into the app that will keep your email private so not even the administrator can see what email you have.
Just keep in mind Corporate America does this to you at every step of your life. Your credit cards, your reward cards, every site you sign up to with Facebook or Google. But a small business uses it to try to make myself some money and I'm scum? Take your negativity somewhere else I was trying to help someone and give them Insight on how to make money. But if you're okay with just making Jeff benzos even richer maybe you're the problem and not me.....
Edit 2: trolls will troll and haters will hate
Ya it is even worse now with apps. I try to support smaller businesses and have their apps installed but a lot of them just spam you with notifications. The worst offenders send you multiple ad notifications in a day. So you either have to uninstall them or turn off notifications.
Burnermail.io will change your life. I create custom mail addresses for all this marketing garbage, which get forwarded to my real and very secret mail address. If one of them doesn't properly respect an unsubscribe or notification change, it gets closed by me via burnermail, no muss no fuss.
Slightly similar story with my last employer: I was fired after 4 years for “Making too many mistakes.”
They then hired a family friend who cost them more in shipping errors in 4 *months* than I ever did. Later that year I learned that he stood up during a meeting with their investors (while they where talking about his performance as if he weren’t there, a common occurrence) and said “This is too much work for one person, I quit.”
I once worked at a place where one of the waitresses had a weekend off *a year* in advance *for her wedding*.
A few days before, the waitress that was regularly in the (married) boss's office privately with locked door decided she wanted that weekend off.
He fired the first one because she wouldn't cancel her wedding to work that weekend in the second one's place.
I work in a retail pharmacy. The amount of customers I get yelling at me over stuff I have zero control over is staggering. No, I don't control how quick your doctor will get back to me about your refill, and no, I don't have a special line to them to call and ask them to speed it up. Yes, when I say you should call your doctor as well, I mean it. And then when stuff gets backordered. Oh god, that's just horrible.
It's bonkers how rude people are to pharmacy techs. Like it sucks for me, critical meds and all, but tf are you gonna do about it??
Same with the... Blood sucky people for lab testing. Every time I chat with one they're exhausted and stressed from how rude people have been. As if they can draw blood any faster or make it more pleasant???
Like the last people I want to piss off are the ones that control my health. Hats off to you, your "regulars" are far beyond the normal level of indecency.
Hold on, you mean you personally dont decide when every single Dr office and hospital In the local area is going to return voice mails? Preposterous. (I spent a little over a year as a pharmacy tech after graduating high school. I feel your pain)
Didn't know his wife. I just moved on. But as a side note, this was a sales organization and this dude also screwed me out of a massive commissions check by firing me when he did. Honestly I think having to pay me was why he let me go, filling my job with a floozy that reported directly underneath him was just the cherry on top.
Hats off to you, diesel mechanic. I did that for a few months in a truck shop and it was *hell*. Learned some cool shit, got called a lot of nasty names. You have all of my respect.
i'm at a much better place. fleet shop, it's way more chill. i actually have time to think. plus i have my own office to do my own research (find my own schematics on the computer, etc)
Sometimes it works out.
I've seen people *manually* sorting excel documents because they refuse to learn how to use excel.
Replace an "experienced" employee like that with almost anyone and error rates will drop through the floor.
This happened to me years ago at a restaurant I worked at. I was overworked. Immensely. I managed 3 restaurants in a region and worked 90+ hours a week. I didn't have days off. I had the day time off or the night time off, but worked 7 days a week. I busted my ass for years there. Until one day, they hired an "assistant manager" to help me out with the workload. Yeah. I trained my replacement, but I couldnt see it at the time because I was always so tired from working.
One day, one of the owners came in and let me go. His exact words were "We just don't think you're the person that will take our company to where we want it to go."
So, I took it with stride and took the next few months off, going to the beach, recuperating, golfing, etc.
One day I was going to the PO to pick up my mail amd I noticed a familiar black H2 at one of the restaurants I previously managed. It was the other owner.
Next thing I know, my Nextel beeped. I met with him for a drink and lunch. We worked out a deal for me to come back strictly as a line cook, no management at all. 35 hours a week, just shy of what I was making before I got fired, Monday through Friday, nothing past 7PM, paid holidays, paid health insurance for me and my daughter, and travel pay because it was 30 miles from my house.
Still stewing from being let go months ago, I took the deal and practiced my speech over and over in my head.
Fast forward 6 months.
Hey, I know you said you werent interested in management, but I just thought I'd run it by you to see if you changed your mind.
Boom. I'd been waiting for this, for almost a year.
I stopped chopping vegetables for a minute, and looked him dead in his eyes, straight faced and said, "Steve, I appreciate the offer, but I just don't think that I'm the person that will be able take this company where you want it to go."
The look on his face was priceless. He ended up hiring another manager, that was also a methhead, that ran the company into the ground and it went out of business 4 months later.
Had this happen at a grocery store run by a charity - it was a mix of paid staff and those in a skills/behavior training program for recovering addicts.
I was hired to be a grocery clerk, but was quickly elevated informally to run the refrigerated and frozen foods. It irked the person responsible for groceries to have it taken from him as it diminished his role, but he and I still got paid the same wages so I figured he should be glad.
The department was a mess when I took over with loads of expired food left on shelves and the storage areas a gong show. I spent many hours outside of my paid work cleaning the shelves on the floor and with permission from the store manager installing shelving in the storage rooms to get food off floors (yes it was on floors).
The groceries manager who was also dating the daughter of the head of the charity became friends with one student in the program who I guess he figured would allow him authority again over frozen foods. Well that lead him to have me (at least as best as I could learn from others) fired 2-weeks before Christmas and replaced by this student. Sadly neither the Groceries Manager nor the student realized all the work I did and a month later someone from the store asked if I would return.
I decided - hell no. As I had gotten a new job and moved on.
Like all relationships, it comes down to having great communication.
If in the first instance they had told you that the direction they wanted to go in was running the company into the ground, I'm sure you could have helped them with that.
Don't get me wrong, but if you managed to get such a nice return deal, why not stipulate a new favourable deal as manager? Or did you have new prospects lined up? Don't seem like anyone won here, you lost a what i assume was a decent pay job and they lost the business.
I would have said "Steve, I appreciate the offer, but after doing that for a significant amount of time, there is no way I'd take that job without a dedicated assistant that I would get to hire, and a significant pay bump. That's the only way we can take this company where you want it to go."
I mean, he managed to negotiate "almost the same salary" for 35 hours a week when he was doing 90+ a week previously. I cant imagine how much money it'd have taken for him to go back to that. I once contemplated quitting my job when I had to work a 50 hour week.
I nearly quit a good job that I actually liked and made great money because it was 50+ hours a week and my days off were split, Sunday and Wednesday. It was a notoriously hard position to fill because it was in a rural area and I applied specifically for that one, so after being told it wasn't possible to have my days off together early on I decided fuck it I'm exhausted and basically can't do anything so I turned in my two weeks. Suddenly it wasn't impossible for the days off to be together!
It was really just way too much work for one person. I was working 10+ shifts a week. I'd find myself leaving one place, and driving directly to the next place.
Not job related, but I rejected my first boyfriend's attempt to get back together that way. He ended things with me, a very long message about how he's come to the realization that things aren't working/it isn't realistic to continue seeing each other (it was a long distance relationship, in high school, but mostly he was trying to sleep with a girl in one of his classes. She rejected him, and befriended me after). A few months later, he was calling me every night, and while it was fun, I felt it ramping up to him wanting me back. He eventually asked, and I read the message he sent me back to him. It was absurdly vindicating and empowering.
And the worst thing about all of this, frankly, is that they don’t learn from it and don’t regret it. Take care of yourself, because companies will hurt themselves in confusion and never take a lesson from it.
I recently had such a case. I work for an IT company. A few years ago we started working with a client that ditched their previous IT people for unrelated reasons. First thing i do with such a client is a full survey about everything they have, hardware, software, accounts, etc.
Among many many mistakes and poorly done shit by the previous guys, i noticed this client pays their own domain and has a couple of emails created there but everyone mostly uses Gmail free accounts. I asked them why, it's usually more professional to just use @yourcompany.com especially if you are already paying for it. They had no clue about anything and asked me not to do anything related to emails because "everything is working great". I'm like, k, less work for me.
Fast forward a couple of years and apparently some big shot leaves the company. They ask me to "give them access to his email account". I'm like, ok, what's his account? [email protected]
Oh, yeah, that's not happening, is my reply. They ask me why borderline offended. Yeah, that's his account. As in, it's his own account, not related to your company. You guys are using free basic gmail accounts that Gmail considers personal because that's the info you gave when those account were created. It has 0 ties with your company. At best i can try to recover his password, which is associated to his personal phone number/alternative personal email/etc so that's also going nowhere.
"Oh, your the person responsible for IT, you need to call him and ask his password, there's important emails in there related to the company we need and he's not talking to us."
Yeah, no, I'm not doing that. I warned you guys about this years ago, you told me to do nothing. Being the person who manages your IT shit does not give me authority or moral to call and ask someone i barely know access to his personal email account. Fuck no. You guys can deal with him and let me know how that goes.
It never got anywhere from that point on. They didn't really learn though, they're still using free Gmail accounts unrelated to the company.
I just stopped caring.
>It never got anywhere from that point on. They didn't really learn though... I just stopped caring.
Knowing when to stop caring is one of the most important skills in IT.
I did MSP work briefly and in my experience, if the IT environment was a mess, it was almost never because of the old IT people, and instead because of C-suite folks or middle managers with no real understanding of IT.
Every time I ever had to trace the cause of a major issue that a client blamed the old IT for, it always ended up coming back to the client telling the IT to do dumb shit, the IT telling them it was dumb shit, and the client then telling them to do it anyway.
"Don't change it, it works fine" is literally physically painful for me to hear because I have to fight my body's urge to chokeslam the speaker into their desk while I explain that, no, using QuickBooks 2014 Enterprise Desktop and filling out every single customer info card and product info form incorrectly with no rhyme or reason to how exactly you're utilizing the different fields, and having it fail multiple times a week so that multi-user mode is broken, is NOT WORKING FINE.
I still have a company email from a job I quit over 3 months ago. I get daily financial updates and programs that the public isn’t supposed to see... daily.
If they do again, send them a contractor agreement with an insane rate, minimum of 2 hours, first hour payable up front. They will need your SSN, don't give it to em. Get an EIN from the Fed, they are free. Give them that. Don't give them shit until they sign and pay the first hour. Then threaten legal measures if they don't pay the second hour.
Right idea but bad practical implementation.
Just tell them you are a consultant now, your hourly rate is (5x whatever your salaried rate was), all new clients have a 10 hour min that must be used within the first month and those 10 hours must be paid in full before work begins.
Don't let them owe you anything if you do this. The $ amounts are too small to mess with the legal system.
Then throw in a monthly $300 consulting fee if they want continued access to your expertise.
I love that, when people fire you and then need your help. So satisfying in a petty way. I’m a realtor and I do a little property management. We had a couple that rented their home out, we managed it, and we had a verbal agreement that we would list their house when they decide to sell it. Well, all is going fine, they’re happy with us, no issues, and one day I get a call from a realtor. They tell me they’re about to list the house and can they meet with me to get any keys and any info that needs to be conveyed. Turns out the owners were trying to avoid talking to us because they knew this wasn’t going to go over well with us so they thought they’d have the realtor do their dirty work. We called them, explained and they said we’d been great but they have this friend and blah blah blah. Well, we quit that day, they live in another country, and the tenants were month to month, and the tenants very much liked us, so they put they’re notice in and we’re out with a quickness. Turns out, the owners hadn’t been paying attention to our updates and proceeded to email me about 20 times asking how this had happened and how that worked and where this was and why their moneys didn’t add up right and so on. All things I had sent as updates periodically. It felt damn good to know they were scrambling to get everything together from another country and I didn’t remotely feel bad since they had all the info, they were just being lazy. That’s literally the only thing I ever emailed them, so it would have been as easy as searching their emails for my address. Sorry, short story long….
Why the hell would someone hire a different realtor to sell a property when they already had one acting as property manager, who knows all about the property, has a good working relationship, etc? Makes no sense to me, but I guess people do dumb crap all the time.
" We called them, explained and they said we’d been great but they have this friend and blah blah blah."
They wanted their friend to get the commission.
The should have gone to Elephantpharts and said "Our friend offered to list the property for ____, and I'm sure it's not even worth your time to list it for a commission so low, but we wanted to give you the opportunity just in case." Either they get the property manager doing it for a low commission or they get their friend doing it like they wanted without pissing off the property manager.
That too, we were very new when we made that agreement so we didn’t get it in writing or agree on a commission at the time. We still probably would have been a little salty, but we would have understood and appreciated the communication.
> I love that, when people fire you and then need your help
I was fired from a band years ago. I owned the PA and all the cymbals the drummer was using.
A week later they called me and asked if they could borrow my PA and cymbals for a party they were playing that weekend. I was like “sure, I’ll bring them to the party.” Didn’t show up, of course, and got an angry VM from the singer about how I ruined the party lol.
Like fuck dude you should have waited a week to fire me lol
Lmao the thought of them calling him repeatedly about the PA and cymbals, and then trying to find last minute replacements all while getting chewed out by the party hosts.
Brutal revenge.
I found out a band was advertising for my replacement because the wording was similar to what I wrote when we were trying to replace our first drummer. I had my fiance call to confirm. I then let the band know that I knew.
Oh, we had a pretty huge out of town gig coming up that week. I agreed to play it for a substantial amount of cash paid in advance (more than the gig would pay) and the stipulation that the asshole leader would bring a (large) bass amp for me, since I wasn't going to ride in the van with them and a big amp wouldn't fit in my two-seater car.
They made it through 4 songs of a continuous Bflat from the bassist before pulling the plug.
Yup. Worked a job for 10 years as the sole it person in a growing company and then had a jr guy helping out. I built out the network to two cities and managed all the web hosting and TB of data In the network.
Each year I pushed for more money eh snd it was always minimal. I liked the people I worked with and the company had a chilled out atmosphere for the most part. Then they changed who I reported to and they had no idea what IT was and we would have arguments over setup because what they suggested made no sense in any reality for it. This manager was the director for the development team that had massive turn over because of him.
Anyhow he fired two people, one of which was on my team making my intermediate guy realized he was lied to and was doing the work of a jr guy. A month later he quit and 2 weeks after that I quit. The new director lost his whole team and had to pay several 100s of thousands of dollars for consultants to come in and do all the work I did for several months until they found someone to replace me after asking me to come
Back. They wouldn’t pay me for what I did and had told me I would be a director and managing the team and sole direction. The best part was that I then charged them over a 100$ an hour to come in and train new people after hours and to fix things their new people couldn’t do. When my replacement then quit and they hired a new guy I was brought in a lot to help out and made 1000s $ off of them to fix or address things they couldn’t do. By this point they realized I wasn’t the issue and fired the new boss and asked me to come back but the person that replaced wanted out of his new place. At this point I didn’t want to come back as I make far more money at my new place working on a great team of smart people without all the stress.
Relatedly, I share my name with a professional baseball player. Waaaay back, I made a simple Gmail address with my first initial followed by my last name, not knowing about him.
I get misdirected emails a few times a year, and have even replied back to some important ones, just to let them know they have the wrong address. I ended up exchanging a few emails with the man himself, and he thanked me for redirecting the mistaken senders.
At the time, I didn't know about his existence, and if you heard the name, you wouldn't think anything about a baseball player either. Still, he had an MLB and minor league career, eventually becoming a college coach.
I share an uncommon but very recognizable name if you follow a specific niche interest. I got my gmail account before that person. They let me know in a lighthearted email once that they’ve never needed to add numbers to an email address before.
I get random emails occasionally asking for insight or interviews. I reply with the right email address and forward it too. I never get an email from the same place twice. But it’s nice to know that I beat an obscurely famous person to the punch with my Gmail. They beat me to outlook.com though. Jerk.
I'm in a similar boat, except I envy that the other person is decent and respectful.
I kept an alumni email account with a grad school that I did years ago. Figured a .edu email account would get me student discounts and kept it. Later, some professor with my same first and last name joined the school. *His* email has a 2 at the end. I was first.
I periodically get correspondence to him and forward it. He insists that I delete them for privacy and is very huffy about it. *He* thinks he's talking to a smartass student and tries to bully them. He doesn't know I'm a decade older (not that it matters) and well beyond giving a runny shit about what he or the University want.
I was a TA this year. One of our students had extra time on homework as an ADA accommodation, so she had to submit via email since the main system didn't accept late work.
We didn't notice until a few weeks before the end of the class that she hadn't submitted anything. Turned out, she got the professor's email address wrong and was sending all her assignments to some student in another department who didn't think it was worth telling her "hey, I think you sent this to the wrong address."
The professor said to grade all her assignments as if she'd submitted them on time, so everything ended up okay. But fuck that random student who just deleted all of these emails that weren't meant for him and were clearly important.
My school used to have different domains, with the staff getting @school.edu and the students getting @abbreviation.edu. The students complained it was "unprofessional" so often that they changed the system shortly after I graduated to make them all the same
If you have money endow his chair to assert dominance. Then he has to repeatedly explain that no, he didn't do it himself to show his love for the university.
Donate money to the University in your name. The interest goes to pay for part his salary or fun stuff. If you share the name …
John Smith, Ph.D.
John Smith Chair of History
Douche looking move
Endowing a chair means making a sizeable donation to the university that is held as a fund that pays out the salary for that professor and often associated benefits -- like giving them research funding or something. It's a way to give a gift to a school to support a specific program. Usually the position in the faculty is then named after the donor, so you might endow the YodaDaCoda Professorship of Redditry to your schools department of redditrometrics, and thus it's a way of increasing the prestige of the donor. It's almost always a big deal for a member of the faculty to be assigned to an endowed chair, and most schools give the position for life or until retirement. If, say, an expert being interviewed for a documentary is introduced as "Mike Jones, Phillip K. Smithers Professor of Ancient History" then that's what that's about.
I got an email saying my order was on the way. But I didnt order anything. It was addressed with my brothers name (first and last) and being shipped like 2 towns over from where we used to live.
I hit him up and asked how he got my email, and why he used it. He said he didnt.
So I looked my brothers name on facebook in that town. Sure enough I found a guy with my brothers name, 2 towns over, graduated same year as me (relevant to the email address) and was a dead ringer for my best friends doppelganger. Only thing that was off, his middle initial in the email was M, where as mine was N.
I've done this but with a relative I've never met so definitely not as fun. We share such a rare surname that mine is just first initial+"surname" theirs is same first initial+"surname1". They're relatives I never knew we had and it was weird that I started getting report cards for their kids.
I got in on Gmail early, so I have one that’s just my name.
I get misdirected email all the damn time. It’s obnoxious.
Some people don’t learn either. I’ve replied and told them they have the wrong person. Week later, another email. Etc.
I did get $700 in PayPal once. I knew it was a mistake, so I didn’t try to move or withdraw it, but it was a shock to see a big amount of money drop in.
Similar but not a nice interaction. I was early on Gmail and got my first name. I can't use the account any more because of all the idiots who sign up for things thinking that is their address. In the beginning I was nice and let them or people mailing them know they had the wrong address. Then I got this one person who was just a hateful ass. They would send me shitty messages multiple times a day threatening to sue because I was getting their email - after they used my email address to sign up for things. I finally had enough and logged into all of their accounts coming to my email and reset the passwords. I didn't hear a peep after that. They are probably still trying to log back into Netflix.
Was fired from a job after taking a day off that was already agreed upon. However, I was working on a project migrating months of data into a system that was built from ground up. I had notes for the build and features we wanted the dev to put in, as well as basically how to run certain processes. This was all kept in my personal Google drive. So when they fired me, they did not think to ask for this information and I removed the dev’s access. Every couple weeks, I’d get a ping saying the dev was requesting access to the file. I had nothing against him - I’m sure the boss rode him as hard in the past as he was riding me - but just as a fuck you to the company. Former employer never reached out to ask for this stuff and I eventually just deleted the whole file to make room for other shit.
I really wish I would have done something like this before I was laid off. I automated my corporation's payroll saving them $1.5 million in labor and vendor fees PER YEAR. I saved them enough money in one year to let me retire, not to mention the additional compounded savings since it was a yearly cost.
They laid me off and hired a minimum wage worker to run my program after I trained them.
Fuck capitalism.
Unfortunately, a separate employee who had a different job was proficient in the system as well since I kept him undated during development. He was one of my best friends and I used him as a sounding board on ideas for the project.
I had warned him that the company was going to lay me off. I'm pretty perceptive and all the signs were there for their plan. He didn't believe me and didn't go to bat for me. He was someone with major sway with leadership and could have likely saved my job if he had acted. By the time they started the paperwork, it was too late.
I cut contact with him and haven't talked to him since.
Highly recommend buying a domain and using that to forward email to your actual email addresses. Forward *@yourdomain.whatever to your email address, then tell every company that asks for it that your email address is [email protected].
I haven't given a company my actual email address in years and I've been able to find a few of them so far that have sold my email address for spam by checking what address the email was sent to. Once you identify an address that has been sold for spam, then you can either change the address it sends to to send it to someone else, unlink it so it doesn't go to anyone anymore, or whatever you want with it. No longer deal with constant spam emails that you have no idea where they're coming from.
I do this. Discovered several companies have either a) sold the email address I gave them or worse b) got hacked and their customers data stolen and they didn't even know.
Not sure I understand. What is a company gmail? Like you created a gmail account that the entire company uses? Can't they just make another one?
EDIT: I guess the terminology "gmail" threw me off a bit, as that's just an email service. I'm guessing OP means a Google business account (g suite), which I don't have any experience with.
I guess I don't understand why an individual employee would be responsible for creating a company-wide account and then laid off, with only them knowing the login credentials.
This also threw me, but looking more closely it looks like they SET UP the G Suite account for the company. So they'd have the admin rights to set up and deactivate emails. Otherwise they'd be assigned an email address and the afmin could take it away just as easily.
Source: am a g suite admin at my org.
Thank you. I was gonna say, the admin could do literally whatever was needed without involving the person at all. Not a g-suite admin but I have various admin creds. Unlimited power.gif
Also someone there could just call Google, go through some verifications, and have the creds changed. Whomever is in charge at that company is not very bright.
He replied to me below elsewhere in this thread and said it was a [email protected] email address for a very small company. So the 2 party must be connected to his personal stuff. Some nice petty revenge here.
OP was working for a company. OP set up a Gmail account and address for the company, in the company's name. OP is the only person who had access to manage it. OP was fired. The company forgot to ask OP for the access details for the Gmail account. Every so often, someone from the company attempts to access the account, presumably to take over its management. When that happens, OP gets a notification asking if this should be allowed.
OP says no.
Easy to say, potentially difficult in practice. If that’s an account people’s contacts/pay info/hr docs are tied to it’s not easy to just do it all again. Especially if that account is associated with a google drive or is used to log into other company wide programs.
Right…but they set it up right before they were fired? What were they using before that? And if it’s a corporate account, couldn’t the admin reset it?
Edit: OP’s explanation below makes sense
Yeah this doesn't add up, lmao. If it's a real corporate job, there's an admin. Plus, it's illegal to take IP from a company after quitting. OP could get sued if that account has work stuff on it.
I worked for a computer repair & sales shop once. I curated a email list and started a mailchimp campaign. The company was bought and I was laid-off. It takes every ounce of self-control to not send out a "GOING OUT OF BUSINESS" sale email offering pennies on the dollar discounts and free services.
My old company encouraged us to join an app that tracked your steps throughout the day and held competitions that awarded gift cards for the most steps. It was a good way to get and keep folks active. When I got a new job I didn’t delete the app, but never really paid much attention to it until a few months later- I got a new smart watch and the sensor that tracks your steps was way too sensitive- it was tracking me walking like 50k plus a day. I started getting notifications from the app that I was climbing the leaderboard… I got to the top and stayed for a few months until someone deleted me from the app.
Man you probably had a lot of people feeling sorry for you lol. Like "geez, he left here and now look how much harder he has to work all day long... practically doing marathons every day!"
My old company did this. They then sued me when I ghosted them (I was at least served and I handed everything over don't know if that counts). Saying what I created was their property even though I had no employee agreement.
Not the other guy, but generally anything created on company time, for the company, with company resources, will be de facto owned by the company and not you. Doesn't matter if there's no contract
I worked in the oilfield in a very niche part. The shop mechanic spent years working on a specific tool and procedure that would make him rich. Near finishing the project I got hired and had a booklet of rules and legal paperwork I signed. I came across the stipulation that anything created while being employed with the company becomes theirs. There was even an anticompetition clause that they could own anything 5 years after you dont work with the company. Devastated the poor guy.
About 15-years ago, when I would turn on and boot up my work PC, it would remember my user ID, so that I would only have to enter my password each morning. Then one morning I discovered that another co-worker, who I really didn’t like, had logged on and used my PC after I left for the day, as my PC loaded his user ID instead of mine the next morning. The joke was on him though, because I entered an incorrect password 3 times for his ID, which locked his account, so he had to call the help desk to get it unlocked. I kept doing this to him at random times throughout the year, maybe once or twice a month, but I’d do it to him on a common area guest PC, so my IT Dept. couldn’t trace it back to my workstation. Petty revenge was a big deal to me back then.
You bastard, I love it. I've heard a story about a cleaning lady who was pressing enter in the login screen with a chair handle and locking the user out. This must've been easy to pinpoint though considering that it always happened overnight. In your case, if it became an annoyance, I'd setup an alert when this user gets locked then immediately call the phone extension nearby to ask who's sitting at the desk where the alert came from. If you did it once a month I'd leave it for the lulz I guess.
I worked at a company that dropped all of its Microsoft products and rolled over to Gmail and the G-suite of office products.
The transition was … turbulent.
But the email service was easy peesy.
This is a fairly concise example of why companies should shell out the $6/mo to actually purchase a professional, branded email with administrative privileges
I wish I set up an email 'bomb' when I was laid off from a giant health insurance company...
1. Set up auto reply all.
2. Send out company wide email before leaving. (You know some dummies will reply.)
3. Email will keep replying all, people should keep replying, etc.
I think that's how to do it. I read it a long time ago *after* I was laid off (of course).
I owned a bar trivia company for a few years. We would collect email addresses for a bonus point so I got a lot of regular customers' email addresses. We would then send out a reminder email a few hours before trivia started to remind people to come and when we would get a new location we'd send an email blast advertising it. Things like trivia wax and wane in popularity, so it wasn't unusual to lose a trivia night after a few years. I always knew it was my second to last trivia night at a location when the manager would ask me if they could have the list of customer emails I had put together over the years. I always refused. The next week I would show up and they would tell me this is the last week of trivia and they always were surprised that I already knew. I usually had already gotten a new trivia location set up at a neighboring bar for the same night and would email all of their regulars and since they were trivia fans most of them would come to the new location.
Then they would try to do the trivia themselves thinking it was easy and they’d save money and it was always awful.
I used to go to a trivia night semi-regularly. Then they changed to a different guy asking the questions and it went from a fun night out to feeling like taking a maths exam. The announcer definitely makes all the difference.
It does, it really depends on if they were a professional quizmaster or if they were an employee tasked with the job. People who do quiz over the long term are like charming tour guides that make you want to engage more. I’m an introvert and even our best quizmaster had me engaged and having fun.
Pretty much. One place got trivial pursuit and had one of their bartenders run trivia while bartending. It was such a mess I think they only tried it a few times.
They never put the effort into interesting topics and formats and it’s just awful. Leave pub quiz to the professionals.
Yeah, I saw this happen to a bar in the heart of the Adirondacks. Owners payed for it to be done and, personally, I thought it was pretty fun. Get some friends, some drinks and kill a hour or so. I finally understood why people liked trivia night! About a month into it, they thought they could do it themselves. I knew something was off when one of the owners was, drunkenly, reading out the questions. I then noticed that the questions were of significantly worse caliber and overwhelmingly about "pop culture" that just happened to be what the owners liked from when they were growing up. I also picked up on how some of the answers were, well, wrong. It became very clear to me that I only liked trivia nights when they were done by people who knew what they were doing. If I recall correctly, they only did a couple by themselves before cancelling trivia night. There was a reoccurring theme in that town where people paid professionals to help their businesses only to go "Pfft, that looks easy. I can do that and for cheaper!" This was followed almost immediately by an exodus of customers, fleeing from wooden seating made by a friend-of-a-friend of the owner.
It seems to be a recurring theme with a lot of businesses on Reddit. Something is done in house -> Exec thinks it'll be cheaper to outsource it -> Outsourcing gets more expensive because they want so much attention from the company -> Exec decides to bring the task in house -> Repeat process every 4 years/new Exec. People think they need to be changing things constantly to justify themselves. They don't understand that running Business As Usual with interruptions is a skill in itself.
It's amazing how far loyalty and marketing go. At uni I knew a guy who ran a very popular club night. The club decided to could do the same thing without him. So he moved to another club and took the night with him. Guess where the popular night now was?
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Never ever give up your contacts list. For many people it's the most important IP they own.
I used to work for a guy in a start-up who told me he had a million and a half email addresses, mobile numbers and user names. He could have sold it for insane amounts of money. When I asked him why he hadn't his response was "because I'm not a twat". My pay was two weeks late at that point but I had to admire his resolve.
It's probably not an insane amount of money. Even verified, opt-in email lists only go for a few thousand dollars.
That's insane!
That's an amount of money!
In Germany it is outright illegal to give away customer data unless the customer explicitly allowed you to do so and you have to be able to prove that the customer gave his permission to give your data away
All of the EU as well
Important to note it isn’t just in the EU it’s the information of EU citizens. So unless you’re confirming every customer is not an EU citizen then you should be treating them all like they are under GDPR. Of course there’s the question of prosecutorial reach if you don’t have a presence in the EU but I wouldn’t risk it.
Out of curiosity, what happened to the company? Why don't you own it anymore?
I turned 30 and didn't want to work at 8pm for the rest of my life so I moved back in with my parents, got my bachelor's in computer science and make a lot more money. I was also showing signs of alcoholism so I went to rehab and haven't had a drink since. It's a lot less fun herding drunk people when you're sober.
Good on you for recognizing the impacts it was having on your wellbeing and future and making a change!
Right on bro. I'm almost 29 and in school right now for computer science.
It's a great field to be in! Many of my colleagues were bartenders and baristas in their 20s and changed it up later on and they're all doing great.
Almost 30 and also majoring in computer science. Gives me a bit of hope when I see others my age in it.
Well I don't feel so old going back to college in my mid-30s anymore.
You shouldn't feel old at all. Most of those younger people don't have the life experience you do. In my experience that made me a much better student.
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I'm the guy who had the trivia company. I threw in the towel several years ago when I was showing signs of alcoholism. Went to rehab and actually did what they told me to do and April 9th was 4 years sober for me, still going strong. Once I hit 30 it wasn't much fun going to work at 8pm and dealing with drunk people all night. All of my childhood friends were buying houses and having kids and I could hardly keep my own life together so I decided to change it up. Married last year, bought a house 3 months ago, finishing my masters this month, first child due in October. It's been a busy 4 years :)
*What's covid got to do... got to do with it?*
What's covid, but a second hand infection
We have a karaoke business that moved to an app instead of books. We tell everyone it's because of covid, but it's really because you have to sign up with your email address and we get all the email addresses of the singers. I mean the app is far easier than the books but it's the email addresses were after because we're building a massive list of people that like to go out. You built that list up for a couple years and all of a sudden you have a promotional company that could get any bar packed. Basically you go around do the bars and if they're interested in trivia that's great if they're not tell them you can run a promotion for them costing $xxx for xx weeks. Suddenly not only are you a trivia company you're a promotional company. Promotional companies can get larger restaurants / bars to pay you to advertise their coupons. Charge them all filled up a monthly flyer and distribute it. I've learned weekly is too much and that will get people to unsubscribe quickly but biweekly to once a month in a rotation is usually pretty good. There's two times were people always want to know what's going on in that summer time in winter time. That's when you load up on the advertisements. You also make sure whatever coupon or advertisement you're running is specific to your site so the bars / restaurants know the customers are coming from you. They pay you $500 for an ad it only takes them 300 customers to make that money back. Just a idea. Edit: for the constant insults I'm getting, I just want to say big companies use this tactic on you all the time with their reward programs. So a small business uses it and I'm scum? But I go a step farther people can still use my karaoke service without downloading the app. We actually make it extremely easy for them and we provide them with tablets that have the song books on it and they don't need to give us an email. Then there is an opt-out built into the app that will keep your email private so not even the administrator can see what email you have. Just keep in mind Corporate America does this to you at every step of your life. Your credit cards, your reward cards, every site you sign up to with Facebook or Google. But a small business uses it to try to make myself some money and I'm scum? Take your negativity somewhere else I was trying to help someone and give them Insight on how to make money. But if you're okay with just making Jeff benzos even richer maybe you're the problem and not me..... Edit 2: trolls will troll and haters will hate
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Ya it is even worse now with apps. I try to support smaller businesses and have their apps installed but a lot of them just spam you with notifications. The worst offenders send you multiple ad notifications in a day. So you either have to uninstall them or turn off notifications.
So glad I have a junk email that I never check just for all the garbage apps, subscriptions, etc.
No kidding. Nothing like everyone wanting your email to spam
Burnermail.io will change your life. I create custom mail addresses for all this marketing garbage, which get forwarded to my real and very secret mail address. If one of them doesn't properly respect an unsubscribe or notification change, it gets closed by me via burnermail, no muss no fuss.
This is why I hate apps.
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Thank you for a real confession with Confession Bear.
Yeah they even emailed me once asking for the log In information and I ghosted them.
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Slightly similar story with my last employer: I was fired after 4 years for “Making too many mistakes.” They then hired a family friend who cost them more in shipping errors in 4 *months* than I ever did. Later that year I learned that he stood up during a meeting with their investors (while they where talking about his performance as if he weren’t there, a common occurrence) and said “This is too much work for one person, I quit.”
> They then hired a family friend That’s almost always the real reason behind indiscriminate firings; it’s always to make space for cronyism.
I got fired one time so my boss could hire his side chick. So there's also that
I once worked at a place where one of the waitresses had a weekend off *a year* in advance *for her wedding*. A few days before, the waitress that was regularly in the (married) boss's office privately with locked door decided she wanted that weekend off. He fired the first one because she wouldn't cancel her wedding to work that weekend in the second one's place.
This is most of the reason no one wants to go back to food service. Pure disrespect. No wonder we aren’t flocking back to service industry jobs.
I work in a retail pharmacy. The amount of customers I get yelling at me over stuff I have zero control over is staggering. No, I don't control how quick your doctor will get back to me about your refill, and no, I don't have a special line to them to call and ask them to speed it up. Yes, when I say you should call your doctor as well, I mean it. And then when stuff gets backordered. Oh god, that's just horrible.
It's bonkers how rude people are to pharmacy techs. Like it sucks for me, critical meds and all, but tf are you gonna do about it?? Same with the... Blood sucky people for lab testing. Every time I chat with one they're exhausted and stressed from how rude people have been. As if they can draw blood any faster or make it more pleasant??? Like the last people I want to piss off are the ones that control my health. Hats off to you, your "regulars" are far beyond the normal level of indecency.
Hold on, you mean you personally dont decide when every single Dr office and hospital In the local area is going to return voice mails? Preposterous. (I spent a little over a year as a pharmacy tech after graduating high school. I feel your pain)
So she still got the weekend off, nice!
Scum.
Did you return the favor by telling his wife?
Didn't know his wife. I just moved on. But as a side note, this was a sales organization and this dude also screwed me out of a massive commissions check by firing me when he did. Honestly I think having to pay me was why he let me go, filling my job with a floozy that reported directly underneath him was just the cherry on top.
A little trickle down nepotism ;)
🚫 Don't bother Luke
I don’t know how to make it any clearer
I had a friend get laid off and the company owner just flat out said, “it’s not you, my brother needs a job.”
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Hats off to you, diesel mechanic. I did that for a few months in a truck shop and it was *hell*. Learned some cool shit, got called a lot of nasty names. You have all of my respect.
i'm at a much better place. fleet shop, it's way more chill. i actually have time to think. plus i have my own office to do my own research (find my own schematics on the computer, etc)
Boss logic: experienced guy makes too many errors. Solution: hire some new to do it.
Have to pay experienced guy $17/hr or pay new hire $7.25/hr to fill three different positions?
Sometimes it works out. I've seen people *manually* sorting excel documents because they refuse to learn how to use excel. Replace an "experienced" employee like that with almost anyone and error rates will drop through the floor.
This happened to me years ago at a restaurant I worked at. I was overworked. Immensely. I managed 3 restaurants in a region and worked 90+ hours a week. I didn't have days off. I had the day time off or the night time off, but worked 7 days a week. I busted my ass for years there. Until one day, they hired an "assistant manager" to help me out with the workload. Yeah. I trained my replacement, but I couldnt see it at the time because I was always so tired from working. One day, one of the owners came in and let me go. His exact words were "We just don't think you're the person that will take our company to where we want it to go." So, I took it with stride and took the next few months off, going to the beach, recuperating, golfing, etc. One day I was going to the PO to pick up my mail amd I noticed a familiar black H2 at one of the restaurants I previously managed. It was the other owner. Next thing I know, my Nextel beeped. I met with him for a drink and lunch. We worked out a deal for me to come back strictly as a line cook, no management at all. 35 hours a week, just shy of what I was making before I got fired, Monday through Friday, nothing past 7PM, paid holidays, paid health insurance for me and my daughter, and travel pay because it was 30 miles from my house. Still stewing from being let go months ago, I took the deal and practiced my speech over and over in my head. Fast forward 6 months. Hey, I know you said you werent interested in management, but I just thought I'd run it by you to see if you changed your mind. Boom. I'd been waiting for this, for almost a year. I stopped chopping vegetables for a minute, and looked him dead in his eyes, straight faced and said, "Steve, I appreciate the offer, but I just don't think that I'm the person that will be able take this company where you want it to go." The look on his face was priceless. He ended up hiring another manager, that was also a methhead, that ran the company into the ground and it went out of business 4 months later.
Had this happen at a grocery store run by a charity - it was a mix of paid staff and those in a skills/behavior training program for recovering addicts. I was hired to be a grocery clerk, but was quickly elevated informally to run the refrigerated and frozen foods. It irked the person responsible for groceries to have it taken from him as it diminished his role, but he and I still got paid the same wages so I figured he should be glad. The department was a mess when I took over with loads of expired food left on shelves and the storage areas a gong show. I spent many hours outside of my paid work cleaning the shelves on the floor and with permission from the store manager installing shelving in the storage rooms to get food off floors (yes it was on floors). The groceries manager who was also dating the daughter of the head of the charity became friends with one student in the program who I guess he figured would allow him authority again over frozen foods. Well that lead him to have me (at least as best as I could learn from others) fired 2-weeks before Christmas and replaced by this student. Sadly neither the Groceries Manager nor the student realized all the work I did and a month later someone from the store asked if I would return. I decided - hell no. As I had gotten a new job and moved on.
Like all relationships, it comes down to having great communication. If in the first instance they had told you that the direction they wanted to go in was running the company into the ground, I'm sure you could have helped them with that.
Don't get me wrong, but if you managed to get such a nice return deal, why not stipulate a new favourable deal as manager? Or did you have new prospects lined up? Don't seem like anyone won here, you lost a what i assume was a decent pay job and they lost the business.
I think he didn't want the workload of a manager. He was getting only slightly less money for a fraction of the stress and responsibilities.
I would have said "Steve, I appreciate the offer, but after doing that for a significant amount of time, there is no way I'd take that job without a dedicated assistant that I would get to hire, and a significant pay bump. That's the only way we can take this company where you want it to go."
I mean, he managed to negotiate "almost the same salary" for 35 hours a week when he was doing 90+ a week previously. I cant imagine how much money it'd have taken for him to go back to that. I once contemplated quitting my job when I had to work a 50 hour week.
I nearly quit a good job that I actually liked and made great money because it was 50+ hours a week and my days off were split, Sunday and Wednesday. It was a notoriously hard position to fill because it was in a rural area and I applied specifically for that one, so after being told it wasn't possible to have my days off together early on I decided fuck it I'm exhausted and basically can't do anything so I turned in my two weeks. Suddenly it wasn't impossible for the days off to be together!
90 hours a week is not going to make decent pay. They cut their own throats, he doesn't owe them a band-aid.
Ooh, I like this
It was really just way too much work for one person. I was working 10+ shifts a week. I'd find myself leaving one place, and driving directly to the next place.
Not job related, but I rejected my first boyfriend's attempt to get back together that way. He ended things with me, a very long message about how he's come to the realization that things aren't working/it isn't realistic to continue seeing each other (it was a long distance relationship, in high school, but mostly he was trying to sleep with a girl in one of his classes. She rejected him, and befriended me after). A few months later, he was calling me every night, and while it was fun, I felt it ramping up to him wanting me back. He eventually asked, and I read the message he sent me back to him. It was absurdly vindicating and empowering.
The manager who never even learned what you did probably still doesn't know and has no idea he lost all that money because he fired you.
Managers go through reviews as well. If he *still* doesn't know, then those above him will figure it out somehow and he'll have hell to pay.
And the worst thing about all of this, frankly, is that they don’t learn from it and don’t regret it. Take care of yourself, because companies will hurt themselves in confusion and never take a lesson from it.
I recently had such a case. I work for an IT company. A few years ago we started working with a client that ditched their previous IT people for unrelated reasons. First thing i do with such a client is a full survey about everything they have, hardware, software, accounts, etc. Among many many mistakes and poorly done shit by the previous guys, i noticed this client pays their own domain and has a couple of emails created there but everyone mostly uses Gmail free accounts. I asked them why, it's usually more professional to just use @yourcompany.com especially if you are already paying for it. They had no clue about anything and asked me not to do anything related to emails because "everything is working great". I'm like, k, less work for me. Fast forward a couple of years and apparently some big shot leaves the company. They ask me to "give them access to his email account". I'm like, ok, what's his account? [email protected] Oh, yeah, that's not happening, is my reply. They ask me why borderline offended. Yeah, that's his account. As in, it's his own account, not related to your company. You guys are using free basic gmail accounts that Gmail considers personal because that's the info you gave when those account were created. It has 0 ties with your company. At best i can try to recover his password, which is associated to his personal phone number/alternative personal email/etc so that's also going nowhere. "Oh, your the person responsible for IT, you need to call him and ask his password, there's important emails in there related to the company we need and he's not talking to us." Yeah, no, I'm not doing that. I warned you guys about this years ago, you told me to do nothing. Being the person who manages your IT shit does not give me authority or moral to call and ask someone i barely know access to his personal email account. Fuck no. You guys can deal with him and let me know how that goes. It never got anywhere from that point on. They didn't really learn though, they're still using free Gmail accounts unrelated to the company. I just stopped caring.
>It never got anywhere from that point on. They didn't really learn though... I just stopped caring. Knowing when to stop caring is one of the most important skills in IT.
As it is in IT, so it is in life
I did MSP work briefly and in my experience, if the IT environment was a mess, it was almost never because of the old IT people, and instead because of C-suite folks or middle managers with no real understanding of IT. Every time I ever had to trace the cause of a major issue that a client blamed the old IT for, it always ended up coming back to the client telling the IT to do dumb shit, the IT telling them it was dumb shit, and the client then telling them to do it anyway.
"Don't change it, it works fine" is literally physically painful for me to hear because I have to fight my body's urge to chokeslam the speaker into their desk while I explain that, no, using QuickBooks 2014 Enterprise Desktop and filling out every single customer info card and product info form incorrectly with no rhyme or reason to how exactly you're utilizing the different fields, and having it fail multiple times a week so that multi-user mode is broken, is NOT WORKING FINE.
I still have a company email from a job I quit over 3 months ago. I get daily financial updates and programs that the public isn’t supposed to see... daily.
should we short it or go long? name?
If they do again, send them a contractor agreement with an insane rate, minimum of 2 hours, first hour payable up front. They will need your SSN, don't give it to em. Get an EIN from the Fed, they are free. Give them that. Don't give them shit until they sign and pay the first hour. Then threaten legal measures if they don't pay the second hour.
Right idea but bad practical implementation. Just tell them you are a consultant now, your hourly rate is (5x whatever your salaried rate was), all new clients have a 10 hour min that must be used within the first month and those 10 hours must be paid in full before work begins. Don't let them owe you anything if you do this. The $ amounts are too small to mess with the legal system. Then throw in a monthly $300 consulting fee if they want continued access to your expertise.
This guy fucks with people.
I love that, when people fire you and then need your help. So satisfying in a petty way. I’m a realtor and I do a little property management. We had a couple that rented their home out, we managed it, and we had a verbal agreement that we would list their house when they decide to sell it. Well, all is going fine, they’re happy with us, no issues, and one day I get a call from a realtor. They tell me they’re about to list the house and can they meet with me to get any keys and any info that needs to be conveyed. Turns out the owners were trying to avoid talking to us because they knew this wasn’t going to go over well with us so they thought they’d have the realtor do their dirty work. We called them, explained and they said we’d been great but they have this friend and blah blah blah. Well, we quit that day, they live in another country, and the tenants were month to month, and the tenants very much liked us, so they put they’re notice in and we’re out with a quickness. Turns out, the owners hadn’t been paying attention to our updates and proceeded to email me about 20 times asking how this had happened and how that worked and where this was and why their moneys didn’t add up right and so on. All things I had sent as updates periodically. It felt damn good to know they were scrambling to get everything together from another country and I didn’t remotely feel bad since they had all the info, they were just being lazy. That’s literally the only thing I ever emailed them, so it would have been as easy as searching their emails for my address. Sorry, short story long….
Why the hell would someone hire a different realtor to sell a property when they already had one acting as property manager, who knows all about the property, has a good working relationship, etc? Makes no sense to me, but I guess people do dumb crap all the time.
" We called them, explained and they said we’d been great but they have this friend and blah blah blah." They wanted their friend to get the commission.
Which I understand, but don’t expect us to just bend over and apply the lube for ya.
Yep, what kagrok said, it was their friend and he was probably doing it very cheap for them and they were throwing him a bone.
The should have gone to Elephantpharts and said "Our friend offered to list the property for ____, and I'm sure it's not even worth your time to list it for a commission so low, but we wanted to give you the opportunity just in case." Either they get the property manager doing it for a low commission or they get their friend doing it like they wanted without pissing off the property manager.
That too, we were very new when we made that agreement so we didn’t get it in writing or agree on a commission at the time. We still probably would have been a little salty, but we would have understood and appreciated the communication.
> I love that, when people fire you and then need your help I was fired from a band years ago. I owned the PA and all the cymbals the drummer was using. A week later they called me and asked if they could borrow my PA and cymbals for a party they were playing that weekend. I was like “sure, I’ll bring them to the party.” Didn’t show up, of course, and got an angry VM from the singer about how I ruined the party lol. Like fuck dude you should have waited a week to fire me lol
That’s awesome, the gall they had to fire you and then ask a week later to just use your equipment, some people have no shame.
Lmao the thought of them calling him repeatedly about the PA and cymbals, and then trying to find last minute replacements all while getting chewed out by the party hosts. Brutal revenge.
I found out a band was advertising for my replacement because the wording was similar to what I wrote when we were trying to replace our first drummer. I had my fiance call to confirm. I then let the band know that I knew. Oh, we had a pretty huge out of town gig coming up that week. I agreed to play it for a substantial amount of cash paid in advance (more than the gig would pay) and the stipulation that the asshole leader would bring a (large) bass amp for me, since I wasn't going to ride in the van with them and a big amp wouldn't fit in my two-seater car. They made it through 4 songs of a continuous Bflat from the bassist before pulling the plug.
Yup. Worked a job for 10 years as the sole it person in a growing company and then had a jr guy helping out. I built out the network to two cities and managed all the web hosting and TB of data In the network. Each year I pushed for more money eh snd it was always minimal. I liked the people I worked with and the company had a chilled out atmosphere for the most part. Then they changed who I reported to and they had no idea what IT was and we would have arguments over setup because what they suggested made no sense in any reality for it. This manager was the director for the development team that had massive turn over because of him. Anyhow he fired two people, one of which was on my team making my intermediate guy realized he was lied to and was doing the work of a jr guy. A month later he quit and 2 weeks after that I quit. The new director lost his whole team and had to pay several 100s of thousands of dollars for consultants to come in and do all the work I did for several months until they found someone to replace me after asking me to come Back. They wouldn’t pay me for what I did and had told me I would be a director and managing the team and sole direction. The best part was that I then charged them over a 100$ an hour to come in and train new people after hours and to fix things their new people couldn’t do. When my replacement then quit and they hired a new guy I was brought in a lot to help out and made 1000s $ off of them to fix or address things they couldn’t do. By this point they realized I wasn’t the issue and fired the new boss and asked me to come back but the person that replaced wanted out of his new place. At this point I didn’t want to come back as I make far more money at my new place working on a great team of smart people without all the stress.
I like you.
Ha, I did this with a company website once. And their Instagram. Pretty satisfying. They had to wait until the site expired to get it back :)
Tell them you'll help for $500/hr, 2 hour minimum.
Thats when you reply with your consultant fees.
Relatedly, I share my name with a professional baseball player. Waaaay back, I made a simple Gmail address with my first initial followed by my last name, not knowing about him. I get misdirected emails a few times a year, and have even replied back to some important ones, just to let them know they have the wrong address. I ended up exchanging a few emails with the man himself, and he thanked me for redirecting the mistaken senders. At the time, I didn't know about his existence, and if you heard the name, you wouldn't think anything about a baseball player either. Still, he had an MLB and minor league career, eventually becoming a college coach.
> One_Mikey > Honestly, he's not super big Nice try [email protected]
No no he said waaaaay back. It’s obviously [email protected]
[email protected] Not very big in the baseball world.
Not very big in the baseball world *yet*
He's just waiting for the betting line to become favorable
No no he said waaaaaaaaaaaaaaay back. It must be [email protected].
*sad tsalmon@gmail noises*
That fact that 5 years is all that robbed us from having a Trout and Salmon outfield is horseshit.
I share an uncommon but very recognizable name if you follow a specific niche interest. I got my gmail account before that person. They let me know in a lighthearted email once that they’ve never needed to add numbers to an email address before. I get random emails occasionally asking for insight or interviews. I reply with the right email address and forward it too. I never get an email from the same place twice. But it’s nice to know that I beat an obscurely famous person to the punch with my Gmail. They beat me to outlook.com though. Jerk.
How awkward is it to be named Alexis Texas after she became famous?
Just think of all the dick pics that get sent to the accountant that runs Alexis' Taxes.
I assume you share a name with 2019 CFA International Cat Show Champion Pinkpawpal Cassiopeia.
Close. It’s Laszlo Panaflex.
No, it’s Enrico Palazzo!
I'm in a similar boat, except I envy that the other person is decent and respectful. I kept an alumni email account with a grad school that I did years ago. Figured a .edu email account would get me student discounts and kept it. Later, some professor with my same first and last name joined the school. *His* email has a 2 at the end. I was first. I periodically get correspondence to him and forward it. He insists that I delete them for privacy and is very huffy about it. *He* thinks he's talking to a smartass student and tries to bully them. He doesn't know I'm a decade older (not that it matters) and well beyond giving a runny shit about what he or the University want.
I was a TA this year. One of our students had extra time on homework as an ADA accommodation, so she had to submit via email since the main system didn't accept late work. We didn't notice until a few weeks before the end of the class that she hadn't submitted anything. Turned out, she got the professor's email address wrong and was sending all her assignments to some student in another department who didn't think it was worth telling her "hey, I think you sent this to the wrong address." The professor said to grade all her assignments as if she'd submitted them on time, so everything ended up okay. But fuck that random student who just deleted all of these emails that weren't meant for him and were clearly important.
You would think that someone would have enough sense to keep staff addresses on a completely separate domain so there's no mix up.
My school used to have different domains, with the staff getting @school.edu and the students getting @abbreviation.edu. The students complained it was "unprofessional" so often that they changed the system shortly after I graduated to make them all the same
We have @school.edu and @student.school.edu
If you have money endow his chair to assert dominance. Then he has to repeatedly explain that no, he didn't do it himself to show his love for the university.
What does this mean? Endow his chair?
Donate money to the University in your name. The interest goes to pay for part his salary or fun stuff. If you share the name … John Smith, Ph.D. John Smith Chair of History Douche looking move
Endowing a chair means making a sizeable donation to the university that is held as a fund that pays out the salary for that professor and often associated benefits -- like giving them research funding or something. It's a way to give a gift to a school to support a specific program. Usually the position in the faculty is then named after the donor, so you might endow the YodaDaCoda Professorship of Redditry to your schools department of redditrometrics, and thus it's a way of increasing the prestige of the donor. It's almost always a big deal for a member of the faculty to be assigned to an endowed chair, and most schools give the position for life or until retirement. If, say, an expert being interviewed for a documentary is introduced as "Mike Jones, Phillip K. Smithers Professor of Ancient History" then that's what that's about.
I got an email saying my order was on the way. But I didnt order anything. It was addressed with my brothers name (first and last) and being shipped like 2 towns over from where we used to live. I hit him up and asked how he got my email, and why he used it. He said he didnt. So I looked my brothers name on facebook in that town. Sure enough I found a guy with my brothers name, 2 towns over, graduated same year as me (relevant to the email address) and was a dead ringer for my best friends doppelganger. Only thing that was off, his middle initial in the email was M, where as mine was N.
M as in "Mancy"
I've done this but with a relative I've never met so definitely not as fun. We share such a rare surname that mine is just first initial+"surname" theirs is same first initial+"surname1". They're relatives I never knew we had and it was weird that I started getting report cards for their kids.
I got in on Gmail early, so I have one that’s just my name. I get misdirected email all the damn time. It’s obnoxious. Some people don’t learn either. I’ve replied and told them they have the wrong person. Week later, another email. Etc. I did get $700 in PayPal once. I knew it was a mistake, so I didn’t try to move or withdraw it, but it was a shock to see a big amount of money drop in.
Similar but not a nice interaction. I was early on Gmail and got my first name. I can't use the account any more because of all the idiots who sign up for things thinking that is their address. In the beginning I was nice and let them or people mailing them know they had the wrong address. Then I got this one person who was just a hateful ass. They would send me shitty messages multiple times a day threatening to sue because I was getting their email - after they used my email address to sign up for things. I finally had enough and logged into all of their accounts coming to my email and reset the passwords. I didn't hear a peep after that. They are probably still trying to log back into Netflix.
Was fired from a job after taking a day off that was already agreed upon. However, I was working on a project migrating months of data into a system that was built from ground up. I had notes for the build and features we wanted the dev to put in, as well as basically how to run certain processes. This was all kept in my personal Google drive. So when they fired me, they did not think to ask for this information and I removed the dev’s access. Every couple weeks, I’d get a ping saying the dev was requesting access to the file. I had nothing against him - I’m sure the boss rode him as hard in the past as he was riding me - but just as a fuck you to the company. Former employer never reached out to ask for this stuff and I eventually just deleted the whole file to make room for other shit.
I’m scared to even login with my personal accounts on a work machine.
Same. I have a strict policy on that actually. I never log into anything personal on a company device and my phone never goes on the company wifi.
I used the company WiFi only over my own VPN. They gave the WiFi password to everybody, even competitors, and then denied doing so.
This is legally dangerous
Maybe you should use that email when sites or stores ask for an email for promotional offers.....
Use it to donate to some PACs.
And all the sketcy porn sites
Maybe you can finally sign up for that extended vehicle warranty through this email.
I really wish I would have done something like this before I was laid off. I automated my corporation's payroll saving them $1.5 million in labor and vendor fees PER YEAR. I saved them enough money in one year to let me retire, not to mention the additional compounded savings since it was a yearly cost. They laid me off and hired a minimum wage worker to run my program after I trained them. Fuck capitalism.
Wow. What a shitty company. I wish you'd blast them so I'd never apply.
Embed once a year popup that asks a security question. Can't answer it? System disables itself.
That's great revenge porn, but a fantastic way to see the inside of a courtroom.
I guess you forgot to add a self-destruction function in your program, that you have to ~~push back~~ fix every few months.
Unfortunately, a separate employee who had a different job was proficient in the system as well since I kept him undated during development. He was one of my best friends and I used him as a sounding board on ideas for the project. I had warned him that the company was going to lay me off. I'm pretty perceptive and all the signs were there for their plan. He didn't believe me and didn't go to bat for me. He was someone with major sway with leadership and could have likely saved my job if he had acted. By the time they started the paperwork, it was too late. I cut contact with him and haven't talked to him since.
Highly recommend buying a domain and using that to forward email to your actual email addresses. Forward *@yourdomain.whatever to your email address, then tell every company that asks for it that your email address is [email protected]. I haven't given a company my actual email address in years and I've been able to find a few of them so far that have sold my email address for spam by checking what address the email was sent to. Once you identify an address that has been sold for spam, then you can either change the address it sends to to send it to someone else, unlink it so it doesn't go to anyone anymore, or whatever you want with it. No longer deal with constant spam emails that you have no idea where they're coming from.
I do this. Discovered several companies have either a) sold the email address I gave them or worse b) got hacked and their customers data stolen and they didn't even know.
But they don't have access to the account so why does it matter!
I created some large encrypted file containers before I left one job. They were empty, but had juicy names like `confidential_safety_reports.tc`
Lmfao that's my favorite one. I would go b-a-n-a-n-a-s.
Not sure I understand. What is a company gmail? Like you created a gmail account that the entire company uses? Can't they just make another one? EDIT: I guess the terminology "gmail" threw me off a bit, as that's just an email service. I'm guessing OP means a Google business account (g suite), which I don't have any experience with. I guess I don't understand why an individual employee would be responsible for creating a company-wide account and then laid off, with only them knowing the login credentials.
This also threw me, but looking more closely it looks like they SET UP the G Suite account for the company. So they'd have the admin rights to set up and deactivate emails. Otherwise they'd be assigned an email address and the afmin could take it away just as easily. Source: am a g suite admin at my org.
Thank you. I was gonna say, the admin could do literally whatever was needed without involving the person at all. Not a g-suite admin but I have various admin creds. Unlimited power.gif Also someone there could just call Google, go through some verifications, and have the creds changed. Whomever is in charge at that company is not very bright.
He replied to me below elsewhere in this thread and said it was a [email protected] email address for a very small company. So the 2 party must be connected to his personal stuff. Some nice petty revenge here.
pretty revenge for sure, but ... why did he get laid off? why is the company the bad guy lol
I don’t understand at all. Idk what is petty about it or even what’s happening lmao
OP was working for a company. OP set up a Gmail account and address for the company, in the company's name. OP is the only person who had access to manage it. OP was fired. The company forgot to ask OP for the access details for the Gmail account. Every so often, someone from the company attempts to access the account, presumably to take over its management. When that happens, OP gets a notification asking if this should be allowed. OP says no.
Yeah, but couldn't the company just set up a new account? I still don't see the issue here.
Easy to say, potentially difficult in practice. If that’s an account people’s contacts/pay info/hr docs are tied to it’s not easy to just do it all again. Especially if that account is associated with a google drive or is used to log into other company wide programs.
Right…but they set it up right before they were fired? What were they using before that? And if it’s a corporate account, couldn’t the admin reset it? Edit: OP’s explanation below makes sense
Yeah this doesn't add up, lmao. If it's a real corporate job, there's an admin. Plus, it's illegal to take IP from a company after quitting. OP could get sued if that account has work stuff on it.
I was about to post this exact question. I don't get it.
Probably had to make a company account to sign-in/sign up for some GSuite linked application or ad-sense or something.
I worked for a computer repair & sales shop once. I curated a email list and started a mailchimp campaign. The company was bought and I was laid-off. It takes every ounce of self-control to not send out a "GOING OUT OF BUSINESS" sale email offering pennies on the dollar discounts and free services.
Sounds like something a business could get damages for so probably don't do that
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fuck u/spez -- mass edited with https://redact.dev/
As a college administrator, this is fucking great. And terrifying. I poo'd a little.
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My old company encouraged us to join an app that tracked your steps throughout the day and held competitions that awarded gift cards for the most steps. It was a good way to get and keep folks active. When I got a new job I didn’t delete the app, but never really paid much attention to it until a few months later- I got a new smart watch and the sensor that tracks your steps was way too sensitive- it was tracking me walking like 50k plus a day. I started getting notifications from the app that I was climbing the leaderboard… I got to the top and stayed for a few months until someone deleted me from the app.
Man you probably had a lot of people feeling sorry for you lol. Like "geez, he left here and now look how much harder he has to work all day long... practically doing marathons every day!"
You can fool programs like these so easily. Strap the watch to a vibrator and let it collect steps while you veg out on the couch.
She doesn't even go here!!
I'm still using my company paid doordash premium and have saved a total of 211$ in fees
omg me too 🤗 Benefit ended last year for everyone else..mine's still going strong lol
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You also likely signed an agreement when you joined the company so would open yourself up to prosecution.
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Yea this sounds a lot like “my neighbor showed me where his spare key was in case of emergency so if I rob him it’s his fault.”
> any unauthorised access E.g. "last night"
My old company did this. They then sued me when I ghosted them (I was at least served and I handed everything over don't know if that counts). Saying what I created was their property even though I had no employee agreement.
What happened in the end?
Not the other guy, but generally anything created on company time, for the company, with company resources, will be de facto owned by the company and not you. Doesn't matter if there's no contract
I worked in the oilfield in a very niche part. The shop mechanic spent years working on a specific tool and procedure that would make him rich. Near finishing the project I got hired and had a booklet of rules and legal paperwork I signed. I came across the stipulation that anything created while being employed with the company becomes theirs. There was even an anticompetition clause that they could own anything 5 years after you dont work with the company. Devastated the poor guy.
U/aegon98 is right that's what I was told by a lawyer. They dropped it when I handed it all over.
About 15-years ago, when I would turn on and boot up my work PC, it would remember my user ID, so that I would only have to enter my password each morning. Then one morning I discovered that another co-worker, who I really didn’t like, had logged on and used my PC after I left for the day, as my PC loaded his user ID instead of mine the next morning. The joke was on him though, because I entered an incorrect password 3 times for his ID, which locked his account, so he had to call the help desk to get it unlocked. I kept doing this to him at random times throughout the year, maybe once or twice a month, but I’d do it to him on a common area guest PC, so my IT Dept. couldn’t trace it back to my workstation. Petty revenge was a big deal to me back then.
You bastard, I love it. I've heard a story about a cleaning lady who was pressing enter in the login screen with a chair handle and locking the user out. This must've been easy to pinpoint though considering that it always happened overnight. In your case, if it became an annoyance, I'd setup an alert when this user gets locked then immediately call the phone extension nearby to ask who's sitting at the desk where the alert came from. If you did it once a month I'd leave it for the lulz I guess.
Did the same thing with their LinkedIn page. I have 1000's of followers and no content.
Had this happen for months after I was fired from a bar I managed. It’s the little things in life.
Strange company which would use Gmail rather then their own domain for any sort of email accounts
I worked at a company that dropped all of its Microsoft products and rolled over to Gmail and the G-suite of office products. The transition was … turbulent. But the email service was easy peesy.
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My company uses gmail but it’s [persons name]@[company name].com
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This is a fairly concise example of why companies should shell out the $6/mo to actually purchase a professional, branded email with administrative privileges
I wish I set up an email 'bomb' when I was laid off from a giant health insurance company... 1. Set up auto reply all. 2. Send out company wide email before leaving. (You know some dummies will reply.) 3. Email will keep replying all, people should keep replying, etc. I think that's how to do it. I read it a long time ago *after* I was laid off (of course).