Being overworked to the point of having an actual mental breakdown is no joke. I'm glad to hear it made Ted a stronger person and i hope he's doing better now.

Don't make him angry! You wouldn't like him when he's angry!

I'll get me coat

I recently had a proper blowup at work, over an outsourcing companies work. TL;DR: I got disciplined for swearing, but management finally addressed the issues I'd been flagging up for a long time.

This is all because we continue to be good little sheep, accepting that "employers" and "management" have the right to never stop asking us to do all the efforts they refuse to do.

Fuck them.

You pay me eight hours a day, I do eight hours a day. That's a 48-hour week. If you need me to do a 70-hour week, it's because you need to hire someone else.

So do your fucking job and spend the money instead of running us into the wall.

You pay me eight hours a day, I do eight hours a day. That's a 48-hour week.

6 day week? No thanks :)

I was contracting at a company and one of the people I was working with went off with stress due to overwork, he came back just before I finished my contract (I would never work there again) and two and a half years later is still there.

If that happened to me I would have left the company and not come back again

As a newbie on one job, I visited one of our satellite offices with my lead tech and some other techs to replace some older computers. I went inside to get the lay of the land while the lead and the other two techs started unloading the new PCs out of the van.

I walked up to the front desk, gave my name and said, "I'm with IT."

Hearing this, two other workers quickly walked from other parts of the room to behind the front desk. "Show us your badge!" I did (at that time, they were non-photo badges. They had IT's logo, and the techie's name). "Who's your supervisor?!" I gave my boss' name, and my tech lead's name.

My tech lead walked in just then, said that I was okay, just a new hire. They recognized him on sight, and after some soothing words, the staffers settled down.

We upgraded their PCs, put the old ones in the van, and headed back to the shop. On the drive back, my lead explained the suspicion and hostility.

Just one month ago, a man not from IT claimed to be from IT, gained admittance to the server room, and began smashing the walls with a short-handled sledgehammer he had concealed beneath his coat. Staff called the police, who scuffled with the man, subdued him, and transported him from the scene.

The staff there jumped from overly-lax to very-strict in their ID/admittance procedures.

Just one month ago, a man not from IT claimed to be from IT, gained admittance to the server room, and began smashing the walls with a short-handled sledgehammer he had concealed beneath his coat. Staff called the police, who scuffled with the man, subdued him, and transported him from the scene.

That's unusual. Normally we* of the tech world are more than capable of fucking things up good and proper without any outside help. Look at Amazon's recent f*** up. Had a madman broken into an Amazon DC with a sledgehammer and trashed the entire DC through one or two lucky strikes, I'll wager that the impact on service would have far, far less than we've just seen.

* For many years now I've been very much a former-techy, but it's one of those things that you are either in or you're out, and if you're in then that's for life. Curiously none of my current colleagues have the slightest inkling of my career history, or that under this mild-mannered exterior lurks a BOFH.

> if you're in then that's for life

It's ok man, you're with friends here; we've been there too.

I have left two companies that replaced me with two new employees, and one company that replaced me with three new employees.

Still in a job that is requiring 50 hours a week to - almost - keep ahead of the 20 people at one site and 50 at another pulling on my technical work and requiring my almost constant support (because they are off-shored and not competent, but the Finance Dept....)

Only still here as my child's University accommodation fee is nearly half of my monthly take home, bills are going up and who would take on a 60+ year old! And I have f**k all money in pensions as I have done interesting rather than well paid work all my life!

Anon because many of my US peers have been "let go", "as they are no longer needed as it's cheaper to off-shore", and Finance and upper manglement do not want to see how much time my peers were having to burn supporting the off-shore teams (with constantly changing staff). It is going to come home to roost, but not in this quarter and so Finance are not interested in listening to the people "at the coal face"! Too big to fail? I think not!

Myself, and another guy, left our roles at one place within a month of each other, mainly because they piled everything onto us and didn't pay anywhere near the market rate.

The other guy already had something lined up, and I found something paying twice the rate after 6 weeks.

They interviewed to replace us ...... and failed.

Three months later they tried again ...... and failed.

Finally they shifted the jobs to a different pay scale that was at least 50% more than we had been on. Oh, and had to recruit three people to cover the variety of work that we had been doing.

I always wonder if they wish that they'd actually taken our salary complaints seriously.

I always wonder if they wish that they'd actually taken our salary complaints seriously.

Nope.

They'll never admit to themselves, let alone anyone else, that they'd made a mistake.

Keeping up one's false image of perfection is part of the Executive Game.

It was the late '90s and I was working at a place in W Sussex who did control and safety systems. The IT services were supported by a couple of really pleasant guys plus one short fused nutter who was also evangelically religious, not averse to occasionally criticising people for otherwise normal language/behaviour/opinions etc., which was kinda ironic given ensuing events.

Short Fuse had been working at his desk, set up in front of a window. He was using a top computer and getting frustrated with a knotty problem. According reliable sources, his temper got the better of him. He stood up, grabbed his (CRT - this is the late '90s) and pitched the thing through the window

He didn't work with us much longer.

I have walked out of three companies, one after being asked to commit fraud and perjury (I didn't, instead I showed the authorities where the graves were), another after the owner lost his shit over a client cancelling a contract and threatened me with violence, the last one I left because the MD tried to implicate me in software piracy and had demoted me in favour of a mercenary idiot who went along with his scheme.

All three collapsed into bankruptcy shortly after I'd left and the last one ended up in court alongside the mercenary idiot, the owner lost his house, his business and his wife who he'd also implicated (without her knowledge) and was less than happy that he'd been screwing his PA as well.

Once is bad luck, twice a damn coincidence, but three...?

Remind me never to work in the same company as you do!

I had a stand-up argument with the QA man from our sister company who were now responsible for our processes and procedures. He was only interested in procedures.

"I found this transducer. It is out of calibration!" he gleefully pronounced pointing to the sticker attached. "It was in the instrument cupboard."

"Is it being used?"

"It might be, by someone who needs it."

"Who would that be?" (Me).

Much shouting ensued. When I pointed out our approved procedure was that only instruments in-use had to be checked/calibrated he stormed off only to return with a 'new procedure' he had just prepared for me to approve and sign off. This called for everything to be in calibration at all times.... We had hundreds of transducers for different purposes but only a few in use at any one time; this proposed procedure would require a full time employee and was clearly unsustainable. Without explaining, I phoned the boss and said I was leaving to go home and I might not be in the next day.... The QA man would explain.....

I did return the next day fully expecting to pack my bags but instead I was summoned to a meeting with the boss and QA geezer who was told in no uncertain terms to back off. He never bothered me again. But he tried.

"One of the services the nonprofit provided was a certification lab, and Ted's bosses told him to take over its backup systems. To do so, he logged into the organization's server virtualization platform, saw a list of VMs not mentioned in the pile of notes, and deleted them."

Was Ted new to the industry? I ask as I can't think of anyone who, in their right mind, would delete something they do not know the purpose of without at least making a backup of it first...

The 'golden' rule of any tinkering ..... keep all the bits!

I took a job without meeting my manager at the interview because he was "off ill". Turned out he had been signed off with stress and had been away for almost 3 months. I got stuck in on the job and spent over 2 weeks putting together a spreadsheet which automated the performance calculations for a number of our key processes (5 in total). Needless to say that the calculations were identical but the inputs were different for each process.

On his return part way through my work my boss decided to re-check all of my calculations individually by printing out the spreadsheets and going through them with his pocket calculator and a pencil.

Fortunately I had written the spreadsheets such that they could be easily understood so it only took him 10 days to go through the numbers during which I was given a series of "makework" jobs to keep me busy.

Need I say that all five calculations were accurate?

Further need I say that I was out of the company like a stabbed rat?

....but very sweary.

Can't go into to much detail as it will easily identify me to some readers of The Reg who witnessed it.

I worked for the internal IT department of a large multinational IT services company (think multi billion pound turnover).

One day our entire system went down due to a perfect storm of a pan-european multi 3rd party cascading outages. I'd noticed the issue within seconds and had the top engineers of two of companies involved on a conference call on my mobile whilst frantically helping to trace the issues.

All hell was breaking loose as dozens of team leaders and managers started to gather round mine and my colleagues desk to see what was going on. The screen with red flashing images all over it should of been a clue. They all kept interrupting me whilst trying to collaborate with the 3rd parties, who no doubt were getting the same at their end.

After a few minutes we'd identified the issue and started to come up with a workaround when the department director and effectively 3rd in command and whom most were terrified of, came stomping over and demanded a list of all our clients who were affected by the issue, how long it would take to resolve it and what's being done to fix it.

At this point I completely lost my shit and yelled at big scary boss man.

"I can either come into your office and spend twenty minutes explaining the problem, or you can get the fuck out of my face and fuck off back to the office and let me do the job you fucking pay me to do" and promptly turned my back on him and carried on with the workaround.

1 minute later everything was back online and then I noticed no-one was standing around me anymore.

No one dared talk to me for the rest of the afternoon.

Next day I was expecting to get my marching orders, but instead the managers had been in a meeting and it was decided that all major incidents should go through a single point of contact who would handle all the politics, whilst us techies did our jobs.

So it seems my little tirade of abuse to the top man actually improved the process.