Once upon a time, in a far, faraway galaxy...
...some yellow writing about some kind of story glided through space at slow space, followed by a movie.

Anyway, 'bout a year and a half ago, I used to work for a large international BlueChip IT company, based in Peterlee (and other places around the country). I was working on an account for a large government department that used to be ran by David Blunkett. Anywho, the team I was on was a new project team, experimenting with doing first-time fixes, and trying to resolve issues before technical leads were consulted.

While working on this team, it was safe to say that most of the issue we received were very simple fixes that would take a matter of minutes to apply, and needless to say, became very monotonous very quickly.

After a few weeks of constantly doing the same fixes time and time again, I decided there must be an easier way to get these fixes done... maybes with a simple button press rather than say delving into someones Windows registry, or making amendments to their Active Directory profile, etc. I set about writing a small tool in Visual Basic that would take a computer name or user id, and make the propriate changes within a couple of seconds. After a couple of days work, and a few guinea pig sites, I decided I would share the tool with the rest of the team, and our team leader. Everyone was delighted with the toolkit that saved loads of time, and work, and it allowed us to focus on much harder work with the extra time we had.

After a couple of weeks of use, I was approached by one of the Operations Managers for said account, and my work had been brought to his attention by my team leader. They were very excited, and wanted me to write a similar, simpler toolkit for the Service Desk to use so all the first line agents could do the same fixes while on the phone to members of the government account. With the promise of a good bonus and recognition for my work, I eagerly started working on said tool.

Within a couple of weeks, I had the perfect tool for the Service Desk, with simplicity enough for anyone to use. Brilliant! ...yes, you would think that. But, that's when I realised just how much the management in that company were a bunch of cock-suckers!

A couple of months passed, and the tool worked great! First-time fix rates dramatically improved, customer satisfaction was high, problems were getting solved, all honky-dory! Then it suddenly dawned on me... all this was happening because of this little tool I had produced. Then I realised I hadn't had so much as a "Thanks", nevermind a good bonus I had been promised months before.

Over the space of a couple of months, things changed! Rapidly, and not necessarily for the good. The company had changes to be made... one of which was to move the account to SilverLink in Newcastle. I volunteered to be one of the first to move as I was starting to feel settled with the pressure the company was putting on me with them giving nothing back. The move was a complete failure. Two days in to the move, the government told us we couldn't use the computers anymore for security reasons. After 5 weeks without any access to the network, the company decided to ship us back to Peterlee. After 2 months of doing nothing, we were pushed from pillar to post with more and more jobs being pushed upon us.

After a brief holiday, I came to work to find nothing had changed and things were getting worse. From that point, I kept getting dragged in the office by both Operations Managers for bollickings over things I hadn't done. They basically bullied me. They tried bollicking me for being unhappy with the company. They bollicked me for doing my job correctly. They even bollicked me for helping them out with making that tool.

Enough was enough, I had to get out. I applied for numerous jobs... some many, I lost count. But, within a week, I had an interview with my current employers, and the following day, I was offered the job. I accepted with gusto (and I love this job too :-D).

At the point, I had so much pleasure handing in my resignation that I couldn't help but laugh out loud as I placed on the desk of the Operations Managers desk.

But, it didn't end there. I'm sure they just wanted to kick me in the ribs as much as possible before I left. Two weeks before leaving, they dragged me in the office, and told me that they'd take legal action on me if I tried to take my code for the toolkit (which I had no intent of doing). They also told me they'd take legal action if I tried to sabotage it (again, I had no intent). I basically laughed it off, and left on my last day without much problems.

I the decemeber of that year, I met up with a couple of old colleagues. They told me that the company had made some changes to the network one night a few days after I left, and caused chaos with the system, also making the lose the functionality of the toolkit I created. Not only that, the Operations Managers also tried to get people to give them my phone number... to which everyone told them to fuck off.

And that... really did show them!


Length? 'bout 720x420 pixels.
(ShaunyBoi has been surviving fires since, Thu 22 May 2008, 14:47, Reply)