I was working for a temp agency in the 1990s, and they sent me to a “business center”. It was a small mall in the 1980s and had now been turned into four or five businesses in the same space, sharing the general facilities — lunch room, copy machines, etc. I was brought on as a tech as these businesses really weren’t big enough to have their own IT departments. I was told that the previous guy in the position, “Joe”, had left for a more stable job, and everyone in the place was sorry to see him go.
The first week I was there, I started finding problems with the guy. I came into one place and was told a computer was acting up. The business owner looked like she was about to burst into tears.
Owner: “When the last computer did this, Joe said it was broken and I had to get a new computer.”
I fixed the problem in five minutes with a free antivirus program and set up the rest of the computers in that office, as well.
Me: “What did Joe do with the old computer?”
Owner: “Oh, he took it home for parts since it wouldn’t work anymore.”
And all that week, I kept running into things that were really simple fixes, but good ol’ Joe had either taken all frickin’ day fixing them or announced that the machine was borked and had to be replaced. And Joe was apparently the designated recycler.
One owner said Joe was always in the office, working on the system; he’d be all day working on that computer. It turned out that before he’d left, he’d tried really hard to convince the owner to turn that tower over to Joe, and Joe would replace it “for free”. But the owner decided not to do that; he told me he just didn’t trust Joe all that much.
After taking a look at the computer, I could see why Joe wanted to take it with him; it was full of adult material grabbed from the Internet. After I showed this to the owner, Joe became persona non grata at that place.
It gets better.
It turned out that Joe couldn’t hack it in the real world and ended up going back to the temp agency. He asked for his old job back, but no, I had that position. So, he came to the facility and tried to bug me into quitting. I reported him to the agency, and he was written up and told not to return to the facility for any reason.
And when he did return to the facility, I informed building management, who called the police. Upon seeing the po-po, Joe took off like a cheetah, trying to exit the building through the back door — but failing because it now had a lock on it due to a break-in a few months previous.
After he tried (and failed) to resist arrest, the cops called in a request for his records and found out that Joe was wanted for suspicion of dealing. I had been talking to the cops at the time, and upon hearing this, I had my own suspicions. I went to check that computer that Joe had spent so much time on.
Sure enough, hidden in the files was a partial record of Joe’s activities back when he’d worked there. I printed out the file, handed it to the cops, and told them I’d send them anything else I found on the computer.
The next day, the feds showed up and took the computer. Joe went to prison for five years.
