Hard decision...

Story time!

A little over a year ago I was in the hiring process with a new company and countered their initial offer. I was told by the CTO that it was no problem and they would get back to me soon.

A couple days go by and I'm then informed that they're hiring a new IT director and would like me to interview with him as well. It felt kinda lame since I'd already been offered the job but I rolled with it.

When I showed up to the office for an interview I tried to call and let them know I was there and couldn't get a hold of anyone. 30 minutes later I get a call from the CTO saying they couldn't find the new IT director and when they got him to answer the phone he said he had left early and would call me to do a phone interview.

Obviously the whole experience so far has been pretty lame but I stuck with it because I knew the CTO personally. I did the phone interview and quickly realized this dude was a prick, and would be a terrible boss, but I spoke with the CTO again who told me to stick with it and eventually I did get the job.

Fast forward about a month and it's clear the new director is trash. He literally bragged about firing a dude over an accidental outage (wtf!?).

He had the technical experience you'd expect of a junior help desk and his management skills were pretty clearly sub-par.

He was also, for whatever reason, completely unable to communicate with the only woman on our team. When assigning work he would always feel the need to ask if she could 'handle it' rather than just assigning it to her like it's done for everyone else. He was pretty clearly sexist.

The whole team hates this dude by this point but he's somehow managed to woo the executives into thinking he shits gold.

I was helping him set up a Python venv on his machine when I noticed another VPN client installed which certainly piqued my interest. After a bit of digging it was clear he was using company time and company equipment to continue working for his previous employer.

We turned over logs and he was fired the next day. He tried to add me on LinkedIn afterwards and I have never declined something quicker.

Moral of the story is don't be a dickhead.

Years ago I used to work a guvmant site. They had really strict security rules for internet and how you spent your time. Makes sense considering what that site did. I was a support engineer for some of their process control equipment.

I was approached by an operator supervisor to install dvd player software on a business machine (non process related). Basically just a general purpose PC with no function other than time cards and general office use. I was fine with the request, but the reason was for watching movies during a holiday period by the operators. Not for anything official. So I made some noise about my dislike of this request feigning moral superiority. But the supervisor swore up and down it was for "training" dvds.

So I wrote a simple windows script. The script basically popped up a window that said:
"Security has detected unauthorized media inserted into this machine. Please state the reason for this infraction." It provided a dialog to enter a justification. After you entered the justification it said: "Security has been contacted and your user logged. You will be contacted shortly."

This script was then attached to the supervisors Start folder so it ran when he, and only he logged in. We made sure the "training" video (some movie) was already inserted at this point.

He logged in. He just about shit his pants when reading this. He promptly logged and left the building to walk somewhere else in the site. We called him and let him know it was a gag. His response: That son of a bitch Demolishun!

When Microsoft shuttered Windows XP, my mom's old laptop became a virus-prone, sluggish machine. She let me have it, soon after which I decided to install Ubuntu on it. One thing I should note about this laptop is that the battery could not hold a charge. The power cord was the laptop's life support, and I made sure to place the power brick on a flat surface.
One day, a new version of Ubuntu was released. I decided to perform a dist-upgrade. Because this laptop was on the older side, the ventilation left a lot to be desired by today's standards. Rather than roast my crotch, I placed my computer on the table and the power brick on a swivel chair next to me.
I was working on an assignment for a class when I saw movement in my peripheral vision. I turned and watched in horror as my power brick fell off the chair, pulling the charging cord out of the laptop and turning off the laptop... MID-UPGRADE!
Moral of the story, learn to navigate a computer via a text interface if you haven't already. It may save your ass someday. It saved mine.