On Call The exchange of labor for currency can be a grim business, which is why The Register ends each working week with a new instalment of On Call – the reader contributed column in which you tell cathartic tales of Working For The Man.
This week, meet a reader we’ll Regomize as “Sam” who has a tale that varies a little from our usual tech support template, but we like it so here goes.
The story dates to the mid-1990s, when Sam scaled a new rung on his career ladder and found himself IT manager of his employer’s training department.
This was Sam’s first managerial gig, so he started by doing a very managerial thing: a hardware audit.
This was the right and managerial thing to do. But unbeknownst to Sam, it coincided with other managerial machinations – his company was soon acquired.
Job cuts followed. Including Sam’s.
On his way out, Sam noticed that plenty of hardware would not be needed.
“I negotiated to buy it for nominal pricing,” he told On Call, and ended up with almost 100 PCs. The machines weren’t screamingly fast, but they would do a job. And Sam had paid so little for them he could hardly fail to come out ahead.
“In my first month of ‘downtime’ I patiently rebuilt them all with Windows,” Sam told On Call. But his entrepreneurial optimism was misplaced. Few buyers wanted the machines.
“I was contemplating taking the rest of the PCs to the dump when I got a call from my old company – asking if I had any of these PCs left,” Sam wrote.
Yes, he did. Why were they asking?
One of his former employers needed some old PCs for a thin client application. Could Sam help?
Yes. Yes, he could.
“I made a very tidy profit out of this,” he told On Call.
Have you turned a job loss into a win? If so, Click here to send On Call an email so we can share your tale of rollicking revenge on a future Friday. ®