» I witnessed a crime

Not a witness, but a psuedo-victim
About 15 years or so ago, I was at a little party with some friends. I was in high school at the time, so along with most of the other attendees I was underage, but we* weren't letting that get in the way. For some random reason which I can't remember, we decided to go for a walk. All of us. At midnight. And so a pack of 20 or so giggling, wobbling teenagers began to saunter along the road. I was near the front of the group, being one of the few locals who knew the area, which meant I got to see the whole thing coming.

We had just walked past the entrance to a park. There were no lights in the park at that time of night, so it was just a huge patch of darkness. From the shadowy depths, however, erupted the world's most pathetic battle cry. Imagine the power of a lion's roar. Imagine the fear it strikes into those around to hear it. Now imagine a gerbil trying to do the same. I turned to watch a group of kids half our size charge at the back of our group, waving the normal sort of improvised weaponry - bottles, sticks, bricks etc. Our group scattered, knowing that a crack from a large lump of wood would still be painful even in the diminutive hands of our attackers.

Pretty soon people were running everywhere when I finally noticed one of the little runty children charging at me, bottle raised above his head. Time seemed to slow. I couldn't move, I just watched him get closer, closer, closer ... until he swung the bottle. It traced a perfect arc through the air and gracefully connected with my head. I winced instinctively, preparing for the pain, but instead of the shattering of glass I heard an odd crumpling noise. I opened my eyes to see a very confused looking proto-yob still holding a seemingly intact bottle. We looked at each other for a brief moment before he turned and fled, discarding his weapon. It bounced on the ground, making a strange, hollow noise not normally associated with glass.

He had just tried to smash a plastic bottle over my head.

After my brain caught up with current events I discovered that I was now alone in the aftermath of the world's most pathetic street battle. I shrugged and walked home without incident. At school the next Monday I discovered that no-one was actually hurt, at least no-one in our group. It was one of the oddest experiences I've had.

* - Okay, I was letting it get in the way. I didn't drink then, and still don't now. But I find drunk people funny, so I don't mind.
(Fri 15th Feb 2008, 20:01, More)

» I Quit!

A bit long, but reduntancy ...
Many, many years ago, I worked for a small web design company. Not many staff, but a good group of guys to work with. Eventually it came to pass that the owners wanted more money to invest in his other interests. I was asked to do some rather odd IT inventory auditing, which turned out to be for the due-diligence process of the buyout. One morning we arrived for work as normal to find some odd people hanging around the work area, dressed in suits and watching is shiftily. Once everyone had arrived we were all called around for an all-staff meeting. We just sold the company, don't worry, your contract/T&Cs are protected under TUPE regulations, here's the new owner, Mr. A R Sole.

His welcome speech did not go down well. He had bought us, and now we were his and would answer to his beck and call. He barked at us about how successful he had been in the past and this was a continuation of this, that our company would now grow and be so much better than before. He explained that he took no shit from anyone – he made his initial fortune working in the diamond mines in South Africa, and that apparently forbids anyone from disagreeing with him. The suited onlookers turned out to be his management team of yes-men who handed around some papers explaining some of the finer detail of the deal. My line manager noticed that the bottom page appeared to contain a spreadsheet of everyone's name and salary – new owners' too – and we were earning more than they were for equivalent roles. Not good.

At lunchtime, the technical and design guys decided to nip across into the city for a pub lunch and talk things over. I was in a meeting with one of the old directors at the time so they left without me. 5 minutes later Mr Sole came charging into the room, cursing and swearing. He was convinced that all the staff had just walked out and were trying to ruin him. I remember the phrase “communist bastards” being thrown around several times. We tried to placate him, mentioning that going to the pub for lunch hardly constitutes an attempt to subvert management, and eventually he decided he'd give them an hour. If they weren't back by then, legal action would be started. Luckily they came back just in time and by late afternoon word came round from our new HR manager that at least one member of the technical and design staff was required to stay in the office to “answer the phones”. I personally thought that the receptionist would do that, but there you go.

Things went downhill quickly from there. Our overtime policy was cancelled (not allowed under TUPE), training budgets were removed and refunds sought for already booked courses. Mr Sole met personally with all of our major customers to reassure them that the takeover didn't mean we couldn't complete our contracts. Due to his sparkling personality, several of our customers began to cancel work or not renew rolling contracts.

I was asked to do some overtime work, which was fairly unusual, but I didn't have a problem. I asked if I could have time off in lieu since that's what had happened before and was written in my contract. I was told no. I pointed out the page and line in my contract which said I was entitled to TOIL. I was told HR would contact me. Later that afternoon I got a call from HR expressing disappointment with my attitude – I asked what part of asking for my contract to be honoured was a bad attitude and was rewarded with silence – apparently no-one had ever questioned HR. I was eventually summoned a meeting with one of the old managers who had been told to “sort it out”. He agreed to my TOIL request and advised me that things were going badly and I should start job hunting.

Everyone in the office could feel the ill wind of change wafting its sickly scent through the company. Three people handed in their notice in the space of a week, but it didn't really affect things much as we had lost so much business from Mr Sole's “shock-and-awe” approach to customer relations we were all sitting around twiddling our thumbs between rounds of Unreal Tournament. Eventually the new owners declared their intention to close their office outside the city and move everyone into ours, much closer to the city centre. A rough calculation showed that almost everyone could fit in once the leavers had gone – one or two more would have to go.

Not long after, I was called into the director's office again. Reading from a script, he explained that due to significant overlap between my job and that of someone in the other office, I was to be made redundant or moved to another, lesser-paying role. He then put the paper down and explained that their HR people had an odd procedure – if I was to take redundancy, it would be exactly four weeks from today. I had to give them notice of my intention within two weeks, then work the following two weeks before leaving. He also noted the files showed I had two week's worth of pro-rata'd holiday owed if I left. Luckily, I had an interview for a new job that very afternoon, so between us we hatched a plan. I used my full holiday entitlement so that I would be on holiday for the last two weeks of the redundancy period. I then waited until precisely 4:55pm on the last day I had to give my notice before I told them I was accepting their generous offer of redundancy. The director smiled and shook my hand as I left the building, waited until 5:31pm and then turned in the paperwork for my leaving for HR to find the next day.

Later, I was told it was just an elaborate bluff to cut my salary – the person whose job I overlapped with so much had almost zero experience in my areas of expertise and they had never intended he should take over my work, for some reason they thought I'd be so happy at being offered an alternative to redundancy that I'd take it without hesitation. There was no handover period and no-one had ever so much as asked for a login to access the production systems. Ex-colleagues e-mailed me with glee to report a nice amount of chaos.

Epilogue :

6 weeks later, I'm happily in a new, better paying job. I get an e-mail telling me that the old company have declared bankruptcy. Management walked into the office just before lunch, told everyone they were out of a job and left again. Staff, understandably upset with this turn of events, staff took what they felt they were owed from the office and left.

Feeling a bit betrayed by the new company, the old owners who had sold out decided to see if there was any way to salvage what remained from the company from the administrators. It turned out that the new company hadn't been very good at record keeping and they had no idea what assets they actually had. I got a phone call from the friendly director asking if I had any “backups” of the asset inventory I had done before the buyout – by a freak chance (ahem) I had a rather complete set of backups on a stack of CDs. I was then invited to visit the old office to compare the inventory to what was left.

What I saw was a scene of carnage. Each desk contained a keyboard, mouse and power cable. PC base units and monitors were conspicuous by their absence. The very large software cupboard now contained the finest collection of empty cardboard boxes money could buy. All of the servers remained, presumably too heavy to carry, but the UNIX boxes had been destroyed by “rm -rf /” and the Windows boxes by good old deltree. The exiting staff evidentially were a tad upset.

But all was not what it seemed. A good friend who stayed with the company until its bitter end had seen the office just before it was locked up – no-one had been daft enough to steal PCs, monitors or anything so obvious, they'd stuck to stationary, office supplies, little odds and ends and such. It was alleged that the new owners turned up later on with a truck and took all the hardware away to their old, supposedly closed office. A few months later, one of the company suits starts his own IT business, and I wonder if I might recognise any of the hardware ...

(Crikey, that's more than a bit long - apologies for much hugeness)
(Fri 23rd May 2008, 21:32, More)