This isn't trolling, this is highly targeted harassment. If you want to do others a favor, make sure to hire a lawyer and go after him. This is nobody that should ever work with IT systems because that requires a high amount of integrity.
Usually it isn't trivial to log and audit such access to work resources. But if there is any evidence, it might help.
New account. Rage inducing story. Aggressor left the country which leaves no solution. Another motive for these posts is to solicit sympathy donations over DMs.
" I've spoken with HR and they issued an apology, allowed me to work from home again, and removed my PIP."
This is a dead giveaway. HR took a report of a decade long conspiracy in stride and simply reversed all negative consequences quickly and painlessly, with a formal apology cherry on top? Yeah right.
I worked in IT, with people that played dirty. Used to have to record my Teams calls with Amarok, since they wouldn't hang on calls that were recorded via Teams, and "off the record" would promises us stuff that they then would re-neg on like their bonus depended on it.
A different person, also a dirty-player, accused my boss of trying to sandbag her, and threatened to play the race card and get him buried for it. my boss said something to the effect of "you know that's not true, as does everyone on this call" and her reply was "lol who cares, we know who HR will side with".
There was an HR complaint, and I eventually dragged out the recording to cover my boss. Boss got a light talking to but they let him off, and the shady PM eventually got rotated, two months later, to another project before "deciding to spend time with her family".
I got reprimanded heavily, transferred off a juicy project, and made to sign another round of NDAs. Even though I just saved them from one, maybe two lawsuits.
Point is: HR doesn't do happy endings most of the time.
I don't know why there's a belief some people have that HR is some sort of arbitrator or champion of the workers. Probably correlates with no corporate experience. HR is corporate liability management.
I don't feel like picking it apart to be honest. There's an assembly line of stories just like this coming out of reddit, and it's not worth engaging beyond "that's obviously fake". They all have peculiarities that point to creative writing exercises.
The fact that so many people in this thread immediately suspected this to be fake is pretty telling.
If this is not fake, this guy is an absolute idiot. 10 years of stuff going wrong and he never once bothered checking the edit history on his spreadsheets? The thing about taking screenshots and then not remembering if they were ever taken also doesn't make any sense; perfectly plausible if it happened once, but 10 years??? This is clearly fake.
If I was expecting a file to be a certain way and it mysteriously changed repeatedly, I would switch on detective mode and start taking pictures with my phone, carefully observing edit times, and so on. I don't think native app spreadsheets have an edit history. But yea, this is silly.
Of course it's a fake story. It's a tried and true method of farming karma: write the most rage-inducing (read: engaging) story you can possible come up with, post it on r/AMITheAsshole (or similar ragebait subreddit), and just watch the upvotes come.
It's called bait for a reason, and it's why most popular subreddits are not good places to hang out anymore.
To what end? Fake internet points just for the high score?
Or are these future scammer accounts building credibility?
I just don't understand ragebait, seems like a waste of everyone (including OPs) time, with no tangible reward.
This. There's a whole market for high-karma old Reddit accounts. If it has a comment history that makes it look like a real person is behind it, even better.
Buyers are usually companies looking to astroturf their product/service, or scammers.
Google "buy reddit account" and see how many results there are.
First it's a great way to practice your story writing. Instant feedback, and a way to measure impact.
Second, it's to create fake accounts with real post histories so that they can be sold. There is a lot of strategies and work behind this approach.
Sold accounts then look "real", so when real people endorse product X on r/buyitforlife or AskReddit threads about "what product's quality has gone down?" it looks like actual people and not a targeted marketing effort.
Long stories also make for good consensus building by hammering points that are relevant to socio-political discussions. Like when the Woke was riding high during 2016-2018 there would be constant discussions in r/relationships, AskReddit, TwoXChromosomes, etc. about abuse, to keep people constantly talking and thinking about gender issues.
You can also create "tailing" or "follow-on" accounts that post replies to the obviously BS stories, including those that post "lol what a load of BS", as that builds their history, too, and you can steer opinion by having a few of those supporting shillbots make outrageous claims for (or against) the story, and then disprove them in ways that leads the audience into intellectual positions that the posters want.
It's nice to have my opinion, suggestions, thoughts, etc validated with upvotes.
I'm not sure I'd get the same effect from a totally fabricated story. But that's just me...
Yeah, I've gotten sucked into those stories before too and some are just too fanciful to believe. The AI being trained on Reddit data is going to do more than hallucinate...
Not just petty. It sounds like an awful lot of work for very little result. An actual vengeful person with that level of access could certainly do better.
It’s probably fake, but it’s not unbelievable to me that a spurned tech savvy incel type could be this petty. I have seen rejection hate flow for years.
And the victim just silently accepts their ditziness is local to only the office? Sorry but this is almost surely a creative writing exercise. I normally don't comment on these things but they also normally don't show up on HN.
I find it hard to believe the story, mostly based on the description of the new IT guy finding all of that within a week.
Not to demean IT folks, as many of us have worn that hat at some point in our lives) but in the first week, a new IT worker is finding obvious things like "why do we only have 30% of our network gear in the monitoring system" or "shouldn't we change the hard drive with a blinking error light on the server?"
Trolling is not the right word for this – based on the follow-up comment about it starting after rejecting advances, this is straight up sexual harassment. I share the general sense of disbelief but it’s certainly not without precedent – a lot of small and medium businesses place a huge amount of trust on individual people without much oversight, and some fraction of those people will misuse their authority.
This is a fake story. Yes you can access computers through an RMM unnoticed. But you would not be able to change Excel and Outlook without the user noticing.
If he had RMM access, the IT guy could do other fun things.
This is obviously bullshit. What kind of records would “Bob” have left behind that the new IT dude would conveniently find - or even bother to look for?
It’s also unlikely that after 10 years of this, the person was put on a PIP with the perfect timing to be removed from it once bob left. And really the job made the employee test for ADHD and Alzheimer’s rather than just letting her go.
Out of the 10 years how long was she on the pip? A pip is usually 6 months max. So she was only put on it in year 9, conveniently so she can be taken off of it coinciding with bobs departure?
Not sure if this is real, but if it is, he should sue his employer and force them to take responsibility for employing someone like that. The only way justice will be served is if you force it to be, so I wouldn’t hesitate to make them eat their indifference to your suffering. :)
What a psychopath. Also, why isn't anyone suggesting suing the employer? Your contract is with the employer, not the mentally ill IT guy. And obviously anyone who works for the employer shouldn't be trusted here (luckily the new IT guy spilled the beans).
Usually it isn't trivial to log and audit such access to work resources. But if there is any evidence, it might help.