Been there, done that. And if you insist on getting reassurances, even in writing, then the message after the job will be "That was then, this is now. Realities have changed.". And you are getting screwed over anyway.

Lesson learned: Never ever trust the "boss".

He's a wiser man than me.

My motto is "May The Bridges I Burn Light My Way".

Mine is "Life is too long to bear a grudge so you just have to do the most you can."

I carefully resentfully decide which bridges to burn. But even in hindsight they turned out to be the right ones.

"My motto is "May The Bridges I Burn Light My Way"."

I don't burn all my bridges; some I leave standing for nostalgic reasons. But I have never regretted a single bridge I did burn, even if to an objective observer it would have appeared to be a bad choice. Sometimes it's better for your mental health to just strike that match.

My motto is : "The North remembers".

Halt! Bierzeit! ===>

"A lack of planning on your behalf does not constitute an emergency on mine"

But I wouldn't have answered many questions. Upon hearing that it was my old company, given the situation, I would have quickly said "Sorry, I'm not available" and I would have hung up.

Don't have time to waste with cheating liars.

Not even enough time to hear that they're in the shit and revel in the fact that you could help them but won't because of the way they treated you?

A nice bit of karma is good for the soul.

" I would have quickly said "Sorry, I'm not available" "

I'd have done it a little differently. I'd have given them a figure for a day rate and swung the lead with it.

Don't get mad, get even. And if possible, get ahead.

"I'd have done it a little differently. I'd have given them a figure for a day rate and swung the lead with it."

Exactly. Be polite, but always know your value. Desperate people tend to have deep pockets.

And you're starting to be billed in 30 seconds...

Personally I would have listened carefully and politely to them, got all the details of what they need to get sorted, then give them a truly eye-watering price to do the work and insist on a contract before doing anything.

Ah snap, great minds think alike :D

And not revealed that I didn't have the documentation

The only way I'd contemplate helping a former employer in a situation like this is to negotiate an eye-watering hourly rate, with the first month payable up front. The job will only take a few hours, but they don't need to know that.

About a decade ago I did some work for HP at a defense firm.

The HP chap in charge was a classic sociopath. He had to micromanage everyone, was constantly rude and derogatory and liked to hold crucial information in his head then berate people for bothering him to try and get it.

And that's just some of his traits. He was genuinely obnoxious and a bully.

After a final bust up with him after he once again changed a process without telling me (proved I wasn't on the email chain - of course it was our fault for not sharing the information!) - I decided enough was enough. Life's too short and all that and there were better contracts, I decided not to renew.

A few weeks before, he called me to tell me (remembering I'd already said I wouldn't renew) to tell me that I wasn't getting renewed.... eh? I know.. I told you, remember?

About two or three months later he reached out to me to ask if I was looking for work because he had an opening in the team.

I always try not to burn bridges but in this case it was a real struggle and I might've laughed.

"About two or three months later he reached out to me to ask if I was looking for work because he had an opening in the team."

Sure. For 7 figures, I'll prop you up. And for an extra 500k, I'll even take the fall for you.

Let's see how deep those desperate pockets go.

Might Travis have kept any notes describing how to revive the machine?

Had he answered "yes", they would have fscked him all over for not returning all the information that belonged to the company.

Ooh that's evil.

Nearing the end of my working life, I have learned to never be unnecessarily impolite or unkind.

Quite a number people I encountered as mere inconsequential students or interns, I met later in life as people who had a strong influence on my career.

And never underestimate the power of gossip. A potential future employer or boss might learn about you from a person you treated (un)kindly earlier in life.

Apart from being the proper course in life, being polite is good practice. Customers re-order. Trainees become customers. Colleagues start or join new companies and need staff.

There is always space for banter in the right form; give and take. My policy is never to be rude to someone I don't like.

"There is always space for banter in the right form."

In Australia it's easy to see if someone likes you. If they are happily taking the pi$$ with you (sorry making jokes about and with you, for the non-Aussie speaking folk) then they like you.

If they are super polite and formal, then they REALLY dont like you...

As I've heard it: Australia, where you call your mates "cunt" and a cunt "Mate..."

" A potential future employer or boss might learn about you from a person you treated (un)kindly earlier in life. "

Never trample on students, interns, and underlings. They may become your allies in the future, or your enemies. Better the former.

Never ever disrespect the secretary (or PA). Not only is that woman horrifically underappreciated, she's probably also a major reason why the company hasn't gone to the wall. She'll also remember your transgression long after you've forgotten her existence.

But if the boss treats you like that? Burn that bridge, baby, and then smite him with a biblical vengeance. The sort of people who would listen to what a petulant sociopathic narcissistic manchild has to say is probably one themselves, and it can save you having to deal with the same shit twice.

"Do you want the man in charge, or the woman who knows everything" - sign in a local chip shop for years.

Also, advice from the BoFH, remember the janitorial staff. They empty the waste bins of the high ups...

I mean it's just good advice in general I think even out of the workplace.

> while senior management were scoundrels, maybe they were due a little kindness too

Hmmm. Let's think about this .... no! Screw 'em.

A long time ago I contracted to another development company, after a few years the work dried up and we parted (on fairly good terms).

About a year later one of their staff called me asking if we still had a copy of an old project as the server they had it on had committed suicide and nobody had noticed the backup had been failing.

I went back through our old backups and found one from about a month before the project was complete, I explained what I had and that I knew it needed around 3 weeks work on it before it was ready to go live again.

They hit the roof and started quoting their contract which included that as a subcontractor we were required to keep as a minimum monthly backups of all projects we were working on.

I explained that was exactly what I had just offered to send them

After a bit more shouting they wanted to know why we didn't have the complete project in our backups from the next month.

I took great pleasure in pointing out that a couple of paragraphs further on in their contract was that once a project had been accepted by them as complete we were required to delete our copies of the complete project

... I stopped and helped a lady with a flat tire. After waving her on her way, I put my jack & lug wrench away, and carried on to my destination, somewhat dirtier & soggier than I wanted to be. When I arrived I apologized for my appearance, told the gal at the front desk that I was there to talk to the Boss about bidding on a network upgrade. The secretary spoke into the phone, and the Boss came out to meet me. He allowed as to how most folks bidding on lucrative contracts at least took a little care with their grooming, and told me to fuck off. In those words. As I was leaving, his wife walked out of the office. It was the lady I had helped. Later that afternoon, I got an apologetic call from the guy, offering me the job. I told him to fuck off and hung up the phone.

Where I used to work, before we got sensible and started enforcing logical names for our PCs, I had an already elderly 486 based PC. It was woefully underpowered for doing anything remotely useful on NT4 (in fact it's specs were the listed minimum for NT4) , so was painful to use and frequently complained it was running out of something, whether that something was disk space or RAM.

But, I loved that PC. I think it's because it was the one I learned NT on. I think the fact it failed so much, and I had to help it through the most basic things, humanised it for me. I felt as though I was nursing the thing through troubles. The boss was very relaxed on naming at the time (we only had a few PCs to manage, so had no real need for a coherent naming scheme). He called his machine "Chelsea", and I called mine "Marvin", after the paranoid android from HHTTG. Some others that spring to mind were Atlas and Zeus, Lister, Mickey (after the mouse), and Snow White, which was the main PC in a department where they named the other ones after the various dwarves.

At that time, we did allow the users to chose their own name, but if they didn't, we would name the machine with their surname, then their initial.

Where I work now, we just name them after the asset tag stuck to them. Much more logical, and functional, but not nearly as interesting.

Thou should not trample on people as you make your upward journey, ascending the dizzying heights for, verily, those are the same people that you shall pass on your way down should you slip and fall.

I've had a couple of post-redundancy contacts from former employers, where they seem to forget that they deemed my role surplus to requirements!

One I couldn't help them with anyway, it was the admin password on some NT machines in the CAD office that IT hadn't been directly involved in - my only involvement was towing the supplier's van back off the very wet grass after they'd decided to back it up to a window to save carrying the kit very far (I had a Range Rover at the time).

The other suddenly decided they desperately needed help a few weeks after I'd left. As I was signing on benefits at the time, and you have to be careful with re-employment after redundancy anyway, I told them I could only do 15 hours a week, split over two days, at a, for the time, fairly eye-watering daily rate and with all expenses paid. They had to go for it and I banked a few thousand pounds as a result.

About 20 years ago I was let go by my employer. a large retailler. I was assistant manager of one of their busier branches, the manager was a clueless oaf who rarely left his office.

Around the same time as I was run out of town, the company changed their IT support contractor.

One day I recieved a call from my old boss, he'd somehow tracked me down at my new employer, "ahh, we had a power cut last night, the server shut down and the backup has failed, you wouldn't happen to remember the password would you, the support company don't have it on record."

Now, if he'd been at all supportive of me whilst I'd been in dispute with the senior management I'd have told him where to find the password, but instead he'd been an utter shit who'd locked himself in his office while I was being disciplined for his mistakes, so I let him stew for a while, then phoned someone else at the shop to tell them the password.

"you wouldn't happen to remember the password would you"

"Yes, don't you?"

At a previous job I had an inkling that they were getting ready to try something, so being the only one who knew how to create restore images for the Macs, I decided it was a good time to delete all the old ones and start fresh. I then found plenty of other things to keep me busy so I didn't have time to recreate the images. This was all around the time Apple was switching from providing physical restore media to downloading the image off the Internet. The employer in question, for reasons I have never been able to fathom, insisted on using a cellular connection... inside a warehouse... with a metal frame. If a butterfly farted within 100 paces of that cellular modem, the connection would drop out, so forget about being able to download a couple GB of a restore image.

Turns out I was right, they were gearing up to try something, so when I left, darn if I never had time to get around to redoing those restore images. I also let Apple know about a lot of the things going on at that particular place that were in violation of the AASP contract. Can't say for sure, but think Apple finally made good on their ever-present threat to rip up the contract with my employer not too long after. Hard to say for sure because it happened around the inflection point where the employer really started circling the drain in a noticeable way.

Never had a past employer call me up later like this. I wish it would happen one day, and if/when that day comes, I think to give them correct sounding, but oh so very wrong, advice. Or at least tell them it will cost a truly eye watering consulting fee. Something like 3-4X what I was making before.