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cdybedahlOver the night, I've been thinking about something that was said in one of the mettings yesterday. More precisely, I've been wondering if anyone actually knows that I'm in a position where I can kill the company in an afternoon, and if anyone would care if they knew. Particularly, if the V.P. for IT/Operations would care to know that now that he has got my wife burned out and on sick leave for at least a month.
Ho hum.
Ho hum.
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Interesting thought
Date: 2003-01-14 05:10 am (UTC)I did something like this, sort of by mistake. I hadn't really thought through the consequences but the result was that, yes, the company folded, no, there were no negative repercussions for me. That's the result you're after, right? We don't want any more grief for the wifey, right? Having you in jail would not be good for her health.
So here's my story. I was working for a company that sold products and services to recruitment companies. If I had known what a total loser outfit it was, I would never even have started working there. Then they made me redundant. Of course I had to call recruitment companies to get a new job. *smirk* One of them just happened to be the company that they were pitching for a Big Order (tm). This was the big break they thought was going to get them out of the red. Let's call the recruitment company X, just to be totally cliche.
So I'm job hunting, going through the list of recruiters and I get down to X on my list. I call them. When they ask me how come I'm unemployed, I tell them. *smile* I also tell the recruiter droid that his employer, X, is on the verge of buying some products and services from my former employer and that maybe it's not such a good idea to buy stuff from a company on the brink of bankruptcy? Maybe it could be hard to make sure they actually deliver? Maybe that applies doubly to service contracts?
OK, I admit this wasn't very subtle. But it worked. The recruiter droid didn't seem very interested at the time. But a month later I find out that X had gotten "an anonymous phone call" tipping them off to my former employer's precarious financial status. Oops. The killer is that I found this out from the documentation my former employer sent me about their bankruptcy. :-)
To tell the truth, I'm a bit ambivalent about what I did. On one hand, the company and the morons who ran it totally deserved it. On the other hand, there were some perfectly fine people among the staff. People who had mortgages and kids and who couldn't really help that they were working for bullies and incompetents. Also, I was lucky that although the owners had shown dubious ethics before, they weren't the kind who come around to your house at 3 am with a baseball bat.
My 2 cents. Don't get caught.
Think About This, Calle
Date: 2003-01-14 01:23 pm (UTC)The fact that you get like 4 weeks a year vacation is more than we ever get.
Your position is rather stable amidst a bad economy.
Yes, you are depressed about your job, but it could be tons worse.
I would sabotage yours or anyone else's future. Wouldn't be nice. If you don't like it, quietly look elsewhere. If you are as needed as you say, they will fold anyhow.
Re: Think About This, Calle
Date: 2003-01-14 01:58 pm (UTC)Oh, I know. I'm just pissed off because it's very much the IT/Op VP's fault that she crashed.
The fact that you get like 4 weeks a year vacation is more than we ever get.
Six weeks, actually. Five is standard, one extra is instead of regular overtime pay.
Your position is rather stable amidst a bad economy.
Yes, you are depressed about your job, but it could be tons worse. I would sabotage yours or anyone else's future. Wouldn't be nice. If you don't like it, quietly look elsewhere. If you are as needed as you say, they will fold anyhow.
I'm not going to do anything, and I am looking elsewhere. I actually meant exactly what I wrote: I wonder if anyone has thought about the level of damage I could cause if I really wanted to. If they'd made a halfway decent risk analysis they would have, but the Board of Directors fired the risk management guy... It's not that I'm very badly needed, it's that I take care of all our serious disksystems and all our backups. That's the disks and backups for all our fileservers, our internal mail systems, our financial systems, our sales support systems, our customer databases, webpages and mail for half a million customers, plus a few other smaller things. It'd take me about twenty minutes to wipe all that out, disk and backups. And I strongly doubt that the company could survive that. If I were in a high management position, one person with this much access would worry me a lot. But I don't think our management even have the clues to realise that the situation exists.
What I have seriously considered doing is to shut down the disk systems and go on a four-hour lunch. That'd make it impossible for about 450 of our 500 employees to do any useful work at all for a few hours (plus the 0.5M customer accounts would be inaccessible, which might be enough for tabloid headlines), and would probably be far more than enough to drive the point home.
Re: Think About This, Calle
Date: 2003-01-14 04:05 pm (UTC)and would probably get you fired, even here in Sweden.
No matter how tempting an opportunity like this is to prove to the stupid management that they have made these mistakes, it will only result in them directing their anger at you. No matter how you turn something like this around, it is still revenge and no matter what, you will take the blame for something like that and they will learn nothing.
I know that you are looking for other places, but do that and only that. Stupidity like what that company has shown can't be cured. Go elsewhere and leave them quietly in their misery.