Re: What to do about a disgruntled employee

[Evan Harris <spanner@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi all,

In one industry I worked for it was standard practise to assist *anyone*
who went to a competitor out the door pretty much straight away. There was
no hard feelings accompanying this, it was just standard operating procedure.

I did have a computer operator I had to "let go" for various reasons (a
large OEM's service department once rang and complained about how rude he
was). For the first 3 weeks of his month's notice I got progressively more
and more worried about that might go wrong until in the end he provided me
with a reason to let him finish up early. I escorted him to his car with a
sigh of relief, even though I was going to be doing his job and mine until
I got a replacement.

I suppose after that my attitude to letting people work out their notice is
"it depends" but usually I figure people want to do the right thing. But I
dont take it for granted...

On a slightly different note, another site with endemic security problems,
had the s*** scared out of them when an employee came back on a Saturday
morning after he had been fired the previous evening. He proceeded to
wander into the office (the store staff didn't notice or didn't care, or
possibly hadn't even been told he'd been sacked) sat down at his old
screen, logged on and typed a huge email detailing in excruciating detail
and language what he thought of his boss, his boss's boss, the company and
a few other pet grievances, all the way up to the General Manager of the
Division (this is probably the equivalent of a senior VP of a billion
dollar company). It goes without saying it was sent to a number of shocked
individuals.

I got quite a laught out of this, because I had previously been advising
them (for about 4 years) to let the IT department know when people left so
we could disable and delete their profiles, but no-one ever bothered, in
fact we ended up doing a deal with payroll to let us know unoffically.

It just goes to show you never can tell.
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