Wednesday, October 7, 2020

A story about the time one of my clients pity-hired an aging, paranoid, ex-addict for IT position. This guy FAXED me a printed-out email draft from his inbox instead of sending the real assets for my contracted project. wasted 3 months on what should be 2hr project.

This sub doesn’t get much entertainment so I figured I’d share one of my favorite and most baffling stories for your enjoyment. (Apologies for any weird typos or formatting. Wrote this on my phone)

I wrote out a long detailed version earlier but left it in drafts cause it was quite an essay. here’s a slightly less intense TL;DR version:

aging drug addict gets a second chance to turn his life around by working as dishwasher for a local restaurant. He’s a little quirky and sketchy and antisocial but that’s not unexpected.

He somehow convinces his softhearted boss to expand his duties to IT. gains access to the restaurant’s digital accounts and immediately changes all passwords so he can be gatekeeper of the information and become indispensable purely through knowing a password or two, not by adding any Value.

He is suspicious and jealous when he’s soon told by the restaurant owner to let me- a 3rd party contractor hired for one specific project- build the restaurant’s next email newsletter as a one-time project. The email was already planned prior to the new guy being hired, and it was already known I’d be building it because it will be promoting the partnership of the restaurant and my 3rd party company. Restaurant owner is aware of addict’s paranoia and makes a point to be clear that this project is in no way a threat to his new job, and is instead explicitly beneficial to work with me for a short time. Addict employee makes my life living hell for three months by holding the restaurant’s ESP account hostage and deliberately sabotaging everyone’s efforts to build one stupid email.

In that time the only thing I managed to get him to send me for this project was hilariously baffling.

He managed to hold out for weeks at the start before giving into his boss’s repeated insistence.. Then finally pretended to give me the required assets without actually doing so. He did this by creating an email in their ESP on his own, sent it as a live deployment to only his own email address, took a screenshot of the email as it arrived in his inbox, then printed it in black and white across two separate pages (strategically breaking the primary image in half - just in case it wasn’t useless enough) and then FAXED me both pages.

Feigned ignorance when I asked if he could just literally send me a proof in my inbox like he’d sent himself earlier, and also feigned ignorance and refused to even forward me the email he’d sent himself. Would only send via fax as before went around in circles for another month. Then he started to completely ignore any future communication for weeks on end.

Claimed to have given me everything I needed after that initial fax, and it took ~three months of arguing and being told daily by his own boss to give me the ESP login he’d secreted away.

He eventually compromised with his boss by agreeing to physically come to my office, log into their account on my computer and stand overly shoulder while I worked, and then he logged everything out himself and cleared my cache and everything. (he changed the account password to some ridiculous string before even coming to my office, and after he left he changed it AGAIN- he made a point to tell me so.)

I can’t remember all the end result details but even after all that, I think he managed to edit my work before sending the live version to their audience. I remember seeing the final version that arrived in the restaurant owner’s inbox and it was obvious the employee had introduced some sloppy typos and broke parts of the design before sending it to their customers. Presumably as revenge against me -who couldn’t care less and was just doing my job -, although the errors were characteristic of his prior poor quality work so they may have been unintentionally added when he scrapped my original work and replaced with his.

Luckily for me I never had to work with him again because i changed jobs not long after. Unfortunately, I don’t know what happened to him after all that but his boss was a pushover so I expect that he remained in his position for a while longer at least. I assume that he continued holding all of the restaurant’s online account passwords hostage as his plan for job security.

submitted by /u/Orpheus_is_emo
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source https://www.reddit.com/r/Emailmarketing/comments/j714co/a_story_about_the_time_one_of_my_clients/

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