I used to work for a large American company that make databases
More specifically I worked for a small arm of this company that provided a web-to-PDA service that was popular when PDAs were popular. At first it was just me and a sales guy - he got the contracts (advertising and content, and some extremely high-end brands too) and I did the coding and design. Then he left, and I was transferred to a manager in San Francisco. This left me as the sole representative of CompanyName Europe. Things went smoothly for a while until I went out to SF for a team meeting, where my new manager told everyone present that the company was going down the tubes and he was jumping ship as fast as he could. He did, and sent an email to all of our clients telling them pretty much the same. Both managers had taken their client databases with them, leaving me the only person who knew anything about who our clients actually were.

So anyway, I got transferred to another (very likeable) manager in the US who was content to let me do my own thing and for 6 months I ran the European side of the business pretty much single-handedly. Anyway. They started up a Parisian office, with a couple of guys from a company they had acquired - i.e. these guys had gone bust, their company had been bought up for a song, and the parent company needed to find something to do with them. So I had a few meetings with them and on the whole things seemed to be going well.

In my personal life, I was going to be going to New Zealand for 5 weeks, to meet the missus's family and for some much needed R&R. I was a little nervous how I was going to do this as I only had four weeks' holiday per year in total, so on one occasion when the French team were over from Paris, I asked them what I should do. Their reply was to ask my American manager if I could work from New Zealand for three of the weeks and then take the other two as holiday - I worked from home most days anyway, so it didn't matter whether I was in London or NZ as long as the work got done. I presented this scenario to my manager and he approved it.

Now in the intervening time, there was a reshuffle and one of the Parisian guys became my new manager. I foolishly assumed that he was as reasonable as the American. At first he was very friendly, especially after I furnished him with a copy of my client list (mistake number one). Then I went away to New Zealand where I continued working, but copied him in on my emails (mistake number two). He went ballistic, saying it was impossible for me to work from New Zealand, even though I'd done it on his advice and it had already been cleared, he sent an email to the clients informing them that his own French team would be handling things while I was away (even though I had already handled them), making me look bad in front of the client (An Unusually Decent Individual at a well-known German car company) and informed me that I would not be required to work while I was abroad, but he would bring up the case with HR when I got back.

So I got back, and he arranged a conference call with HR. From my point of view I'd done nothing wrong except trust a Frenchman (a mistake I've made since, but won't make again). In the call he started asking lots of leading questions about whether I had enough to do, and whether I had plenty of spare time, that sort of thing. I could tell he was getting at something, and in the end I asked him straight: "Do you think I'm working for someone else?"

He leapt straight at it. Yes! I was moonlighting for the company with my former UK manager - and he had the paperwork to prove it. At which point I asked for the call to be stopped until I had legal representation. What he had found - a contract between me and my former UK manager that I would build a website for him - was something I had left on my desk before going away, which had gone mysteriously missing. The short-arsed Napoleon-complexed little bastard had filched it off my desk. And kept quiet about it for eight months. As it happened, I *hadn't* built the website because I didn't really need the money, and didn't really have the time to do so. A quick consultation of my employment contract found that outside work was not against company rules either, provided that it didn't interfere with company work. So, not only had I obeyed my contract to the letter, but he had stolen property from my desk and kept it - if he was concerned that I was moonlighting surely the time to mention it would have been eight months earlier, you know, at the time - so the ghastly little French gnome didn't have a frog's leg to stand on. I mentioned "constructive dismissal" and he went very quiet.

Anyway, he made my life at work difficult for a while, but I kept in there, making sure that I was integral to the smooth running of the company and kissing his arse. As the months went on he started to trust me again until I picked the very worst time to leave and left.

In a panic, he called me and asked me back to train my replacement. It took five weeks, during which I was paid to do basically nothing. In retrospect I should have left them in the lurch, but from what I've heard since leaving, the company's pretty much gone belly-up anyway.

Sorry for long-windedness, but sometimes you have to get these things off your chest. And the moral of the story is, don't fuck with the geeks who run your company.
( emvee cruor deo cruoris, Mon 26 May 2008, 16:11, Reply)