Unfiltered Story #264590

(The company that I work at deals with sensitive information, so the employee areas are completely separate from the public. Visitors have to be approved by management, and escorted to ensure they don’t see anything they shouldn’t.

About a month ago, a new girl was hired in our department. She was young, but enthusastic and hard-working, so she fit into the team pretty well. On this particular day, I was walking back from lunch, and I heard a bunch of laughter from her cubicle. I poked my head in as I passed, and I saw three other guys there with her, none of whom I recognized.)

New Hire: Oh, hey [My Name]!

Me: Hi [New Hire]. Hello all.

(They all returned the greeting.)

Me: What teams are you guys from? I don’t think we’ve been introduced.

New Hire: *laughing* Oh, they don’t work here. They’re just some friends that stopped by to hang out.

(Massive alarm bells started going off in my head.)

Me: That’s… not really allowed. If you want to hang out with people at lunch, you need to do it down in the cafe area.

New Hire: *waves her hand* Aw, it’s fine. They’re cool.

(I notice that one of the guys is actually using her computer, and is paging through some reports that I know contain sensitive information.)

Me: Hey!

(I step forward, and reach around to turn off the screen. All of them have stood up at this point, and the new hire looks upset, while the guys all look smug.)

New Hire: What are you doing?!

Me: They need to leave. They are not authorized to see the stuff you’re working on, and you can get in serious trouble for letting them.

(One of the guys speaks up at that point, literally popping his knuckles while doing so.)

Guy: I think you’re the one who needs to leave. We’re just hanging out.

Me: And you can do that outside.

(The guy takes a step towards me, trying to be menacing, which is when the supervisor for another team shows up, having heard the raised voices.)

Supervisor: Hello, hello. What’s going on? I could hear you down the hall.

(At that point, things got a bit loud, as both the girl and I started speaking at the same time, and one of the other guys tried piping in to back the girl up. She started throwing accusations about me being jealous (I’m gay, so that’s a no), and more people ended up getting called in. Our actual manager got informed, and pretty much blew his top when he found out that she had snuck in several people over the past week or so. He flat out told her to go home, and that HR would be in contact to let her know whether she’d be coming in tomorrow or in the future.

She did end up getting fired over the whole thing, and it just barely avoided actually going to lawsuits over the data breach. What makes it worse is that there is security training that you need to go through before you start working, and this exact scenario is brought up several times, with it being explicitly called out as not okay, and being a fireable offense.