In my career, I’ve had many different things happen to me so I’ve started to write them down. After all, the site is RealworldIT and these things really happened to me.
I’ve changed the names and the locations as I don’t want to highlight anybody. Everyone is human and I’m not here to hurt people.
When I started in IT I was 17 years old. One of my first jobs was working in a small computer shop, which had a workshop and a small office in the back. In the shop front, we built and sold computers to the public. In the back office/workshop was for dealing with the business to business work, setting up networks, servers, etc.. for other small businesses. These were things like Novell servers, Windows for workgroup 3.1, BNC Networks etc…
Gordons Birthday
I started the day off normal, arriving a few minutes late for work, parking my black Nissan Micro right outside the shop. I jumped out, locked my car and headed on in. To get to my area in the workshop you had to go through the shop front and pass the office. On the way to the workshop, I popped my head into the office and Hello’d everyone. All was going well with the day until Gordon, the boss, come in. It was strange, for one thing, he was far too happy, had sunglasses on beaming at everyone. Usually, when he arrived at work, you never knew what sort of mood he was in. Never quite sure what to say. The second thing that was odd, he arrived through the back door which no one uses. He got us all together and told the office staff to go to the bank and for me to disappear to a supplier and onwards to a customers site to sort out their network.
Recently the building next door had been burgled, so we were all on alert and leaving the building empty in the day was unusual. It didn’t make sense to any of us to do all of the things right now but he insisted. He turned and headed off out through the back door to celebrate his birthday. Within 10 minutes he is on the phone with one of the chaps in the office telling them to hurry up and go to the bank and for me to get to the customers.
The office staff left, leaving me to lock up. I brought down the shutter on the front of the shop checking the locks and headed off to the supplier. At the suppliers, I’m was no more than 15 minutes, in and out, got my parts and off I go to the customers. I was quite happy getting out of the office, and knowing the customer I hoped I would be able to finish on time and head home, maybe 15 minutes early.
On to the customers
To get to the customers I had to go back past the shop/office. As I was going past the shop I noticed the shutters were half open and there were no cars outside. This was strange, who, I wondered, had opened the shop. I started to question if I had actually locked it properly. Had someone taken the opportunity to burglar the place? I pulled the car up and got out. From outside the window, I couldn’t see anyone in the shop. I thought I had no choice but to find out what was going on. Slowly I unlock the front door and immediately I could hear noises coming from the back room where the office and workshop was.
Leaving the door open in case I needed a quick get-away. I crept across the shop floor and quietly opened the door just ajar. The noises got louder. I was close to whoever was making the noise. I couldn’t work out what it was they were doing? I thought are they lifting boxes or rummaging through a box or something.
Slowly I opened the door a bit more, enough for my head to fit in and peeked inside, through the workshop and into the office I could see my boss, sitting on his chair, with his suit trousers around the bottom of his gingerly legs, straddling his legs was a woman, who wasn’t his wife bouncing up and down. This I can assure you I did not expect, I hadn’t been working for this guy very long and had to see this just wasn’t something I needed. I froze opened mouthed, feeling the horror of the situation. As my eyes moved up the legs of my boss over the legs of the woman and onwards towards his face, our eyes connected. A moment of silence, then his mouth gave a sort of weird smile/grimace and with that, he calls out “Hey Russ!”. All I could think was to get away from this situation as quickly as possible. “Sorry, Gordon” I cried and with that, I turned and ran out of there as fast as I could. I drove to the client’s site and somehow fixed their network issue whilst thinking of how to deal with this the whole time I was there.
Later
Later that day, I had a phone call from my boss, saying “Hey Russ, I’ve been trying to get hold of you (I bet you have I thought!) oh you are doing such a good job, blah blah blah, and finally slips in.. don’t tell my wife!” You know I never told a soul for 6 months until I left the place as I couldn’t put up with the guy anymore.
As I said in the title things aren’t always what they seem to be!
