Re: FWD: An ugly job incident (long)

["Walker, Arlen P" <Arlen -dot- P -dot- Walker -at- JCI -dot- COM>]

Ooh. Ick.

This is a classic no-win situation: You don't say anything, you lose the
severance package; you make a fuss, all that future employers will see
will be the fuss, and not whether it was justified. Kobyashi Maru lives.

I agree with another poster, your timing for the clean-up sucked. It gave
your erstwhile manager the excuse needed to move in on you. I'm not clear
on precisely what "old edited documents" means; if this means you deleted
the only electronic copy of projects you had worked on in the past
(meaning anyone who follows you will have to reconstruct the documents
from hard copy) you may have a serious problem. If all you deleted were
personal working copies of projects which still exist in the corporate
server, then there's hope. (As for "personal" files, if your company had a
policy banning them in the first place, as many companies do, then once
again you're in a no-win situation; to defend your actions you have to
admit to breaking the policy.)

I have a habit of doing massive clean-ups whenever my cube walls start to
buckle from the load they're carrying, regardless of where I am on a
project timeline (except under dire deadline pressure). If your cube was
in that shape, perhaps you have some justification. Otherwise, especially
as it happened right after a conversation on the topic with a corporate
officer, you put yourself in a very bad light. You could claim you were
just trying to make sure whoever came after you didn't have a mess to
clean up, but I doubt that will do much to dispel the dark cloud that's
gathering.

I think you could ask for an itemized list of precisely what it was you
supposedly stole/destroyed as justification for witholding your severance
package. That much seems reasonable to me, at least; however they could
just as easily claim your severance package is required to pay for the
time and effort you put them to in order to determine what happened. You
should definitely consult with an attorney before embarking on any further
discussion with the company, however, and follow more expert advice; my
gut feel, alas, is that you screwed yourself out of the package.

"Act in haste, repent at leisure" is a cliche for a very good reason.

Have fun,
Arlen
Chief Managing Director In Charge, Department of Redundancy Department
DNRC 224

Arlen -dot- P -dot- Walker -at- JCI -dot- Com
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