Man's Former Boss Emails Him For Help 6 Months After Firing Him 30 Days Into The Job
The fact they can't get into the laptop in the first place speaks volumes.
perfectwave / Canva Pro A man took to Reddit to express his bewilderment at an email he received from his former boss. His post has other workers shaking their heads at how presumptuous and messy so many business leaders are today.
The man's boss emailed him for help after firing him a full six months ago.
Stories about bosses who have a downright delusional perception of the employee/employer relationship and a seemingly non-existent understanding of boundaries are everywhere nowadays.
But this guy's boss kind of takes the cake. Reaching out within a couple of days or weeks after the firing is one thing — most of us still wouldn't respond, but at least the change would still be recent!
But a full six months later? The level of obliviousness is just downright strange, and the situation speaks to a level of messiness in this company that is absolutely next-level.
The boss emailed him to get the password to his former work-issued laptop.
In the very formally worded email, the man's boss explained that "we are currently unable to perform a factory reset to prepare the laptop for the next user because there is still a password on the welcome screen." The boss then went on to ask for the password.
Photo: Reddit
The fact that instructions for how to factory reset a laptop for precisely this reason are readily Googlable is only the beginning of how absurd this is. Because on top of that, what is the first thing that corporate IT departments always tell you?
As the man himself put it in a comment to a fellow Redditor, "I always thought rule no. 1 for any company was 'never share passwords.'" Guess this boss missed that part of training.
This, of course, brings up one all-important question: How on Earth did it not occur to anyone to get the man's laptop password before firing him in the first place? What kind of dog and pony show are they running over there?! To quote the great Julia Louis-Dreyfus in "Veep," the level of incompetence in this office is STAG-GER-RING.
The man went on to say that he doesn't even remember the password anyway, so the whole thing is moot, aside from ridiculous. But the circumstances of this man's firing make the story so much worse.
He was fired just 30 days into the job because his boss realized he had 'put the cart before the horse.'
"This just makes me giggle," the man wrote bemusedly of the situation. As he explained, he didn't even get the job because he sought it out — it was actually the other way around. His boss reached out to him to come work for the company in what he called "a management position."
He was offered the job, took it, and ended up out the door just a month later — but not because of poor performance. "They terminated the position due to a 'cart before the horse' situation," he wrote.
Photo: ASDF_MEDIA / Shutterstock
But it gets even messier — his 30-day firing just happened to coincide with him having "called out all the illegal marketing practices happening and offered solutions to fix them."
Rather than take his suggestions and, you know, stop breaking the law, "they got rid of the problem, which was 'me,'" he shared. "Now they want my password. Lol." Unfortunately for them, that's … not how anything works!
Experts say situations like this are not an employee's problem once they are terminated.
It's probably no surprise that even HR experts say that workers basically owe their employers nothing once they are terminated — and in messy situations, like this guy's, that goes double.
Alison Green, an author and HR and management expert who runs the popular blog "Ask A Manager," says that situations like this man's are basically the boss's problem.
Her take was that it's this boss's and the company's responsibility to ensure they have all vital information they need from a terminated employee before terminating them, and if they failed to do so? That's their problem.
While she did say that if the termination was amicable and you wish to maintain the connection, being willing to work with your boss on little things like this can go a long way, your willingness to do so is ultimately a reflection of how effective they were as a manager.
Or as another Redditor bluntly put it, "It shows you worked for a rinky-dink company that has no idea what they're doing." Indeed, this absurd password email seems like the tip of the iceberg, and not only does this guy owe them nothing — but boy oh boy, did he dodge a bullet.
John Sundholm is a news and entertainment writer who covers pop culture, social justice and human interest topics.