I was fired from my first proper job after college – got a position with a major mobile telecommunications company doing the tech end of base-station equipment preparation, we’d then ship it out to actually be installed.
Anyway, said company started having ‘troubles’ not long after I joined and people were being laid off left right and centre, so gradually work slowed down to almost nothing, so most of the mornings/evenings shifts were spent generally arsing about.
Long story short, there was another new guy on the opposite shift that I worked, and was quite an arrogant know-it-all, who often passed off the work me and another new lad did, as his own and generally seemed to what to get one over on us at every opportunity. By the end I ‘left’ he had rubbed up almost everyone in the wrong way, and to top it all off the guy was thick as pig stuff.
Anyway, one day me and this other lad arrive for the evening shift and go grab a secluded workstation, planning an afternoon of solid web browsing (this was back in the days of modems and ~1 meg ADSL), but the arrogant bloke was using it; well just shutting down for the day. Whilst my mate distracted him I switched the KVM onto one of the Sun servers and booted it up, I then convinced arrogant bloke that I had rebooted his Windows machine
He leaves for the day and I switch back to his Windows log on and we sit there discussing a good way to play a joke on him…. his Outlook was still open….. I come up with the “great” idea of composing an email to the head of the department (a guy almost at director level) and to this day recall its contents:
“Please sack me ASAP
I want to have sex with you and your wife, you can have a go with mine, she’s a bit of a dog, but what the hell.
I would….”
The unfinished paragraph is where others had come over to laugh at this hilarious gag, and during the general banter I remarked on how funny it would be to send it, then mis-clicked and sent it! In my sheer panic, I could think of nothing but to hard reset the workstation
After losing my job I found out that Outlook had a recall feature – hadn’t used it before, iirc our college email program, was Pegasus.
Anyway, in line with the thread, after the email winged its merry way to the head honcho, I apparently lost all colour to my face and as you can probably guess, this was a moment where I wanted the floor to open up and swallow me – worse still, there were 3 hours of our shift before this big boss left for home; I dreaded he’d come down!
The next day you could literally cut through the air with a knife, I and the other lad walked in to hushed silences and two teams staring at us, it was stifling!
Looking back now, I really regret doing it, the guy who’s account I had sent it from was suspended during the investigation and took to heavy drinking
, I admitted what I did straight away and told them not to bother running an investigation – I was given a week’s garden leave whilst they sorted everything out and that was the end of that job.
Oh and sneaky ninja edit: The same year I got fired, channel 5 (I think, may have been 4), were about to put together a show about ‘emails you wish you never sent’ and my old team put me forward for it lol, I declined of course, as I didn’t want to hurt future career prospects – guess I missed my 15 minutes of fame
Anyway, said company started having ‘troubles’ not long after I joined and people were being laid off left right and centre, so gradually work slowed down to almost nothing, so most of the mornings/evenings shifts were spent generally arsing about.
Long story short, there was another new guy on the opposite shift that I worked, and was quite an arrogant know-it-all, who often passed off the work me and another new lad did, as his own and generally seemed to what to get one over on us at every opportunity. By the end I ‘left’ he had rubbed up almost everyone in the wrong way, and to top it all off the guy was thick as pig stuff.
Anyway, one day me and this other lad arrive for the evening shift and go grab a secluded workstation, planning an afternoon of solid web browsing (this was back in the days of modems and ~1 meg ADSL), but the arrogant bloke was using it; well just shutting down for the day. Whilst my mate distracted him I switched the KVM onto one of the Sun servers and booted it up, I then convinced arrogant bloke that I had rebooted his Windows machine
He leaves for the day and I switch back to his Windows log on and we sit there discussing a good way to play a joke on him…. his Outlook was still open….. I come up with the “great” idea of composing an email to the head of the department (a guy almost at director level) and to this day recall its contents:
“Please sack me ASAP
I want to have sex with you and your wife, you can have a go with mine, she’s a bit of a dog, but what the hell.
I would….”
The unfinished paragraph is where others had come over to laugh at this hilarious gag, and during the general banter I remarked on how funny it would be to send it, then mis-clicked and sent it! In my sheer panic, I could think of nothing but to hard reset the workstation
After losing my job I found out that Outlook had a recall feature – hadn’t used it before, iirc our college email program, was Pegasus.
Anyway, in line with the thread, after the email winged its merry way to the head honcho, I apparently lost all colour to my face and as you can probably guess, this was a moment where I wanted the floor to open up and swallow me – worse still, there were 3 hours of our shift before this big boss left for home; I dreaded he’d come down!
The next day you could literally cut through the air with a knife, I and the other lad walked in to hushed silences and two teams staring at us, it was stifling!
Looking back now, I really regret doing it, the guy who’s account I had sent it from was suspended during the investigation and took to heavy drinking
, I admitted what I did straight away and told them not to bother running an investigation – I was given a week’s garden leave whilst they sorted everything out and that was the end of that job.Oh and sneaky ninja edit: The same year I got fired, channel 5 (I think, may have been 4), were about to put together a show about ‘emails you wish you never sent’ and my old team put me forward for it lol, I declined of course, as I didn’t want to hurt future career prospects – guess I missed my 15 minutes of fame
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