Walked posted:

This is true; I'll reach out and ask - I do appreciate the suggestion. I'm just averse to asking sales people to put me in touch / coordinate when I know this wont go through them in the end for purchase.

Toshimo posted:

Success means being able to afford the personal life that allows me to endure my job.

Collateral Damage posted:

quote:

Hey Team

Although <uniball>'s departure is sudden, we have known that <uniball> has not had the best experience over the past few months. We have actively been working with <uniball> and it is disappointing to see him leave in this way. As you know the connections and relationships we build in the store are the foundation of our Credo and Apple. We may never understand why <uniball> left the way he did but I confident in the team that we have today.

Many of you have approached me over the last few weeks to tell me how excited you are about the experience you are having in the family room. Although we have many opportunities, our culture and performance is changing to one of success and resilience. Continuing to hold each other accountable to the environment you want to create is the key to our success.

Let's continue to keep our dialogue open and if you have any questions or concerns please feel free to reach out.

Thanks

<store manager>

uniball posted:

I know "don't burn bridges" is universal advice regarding leaving a job you hate, but in my specific situation I'm positive it was the right choice. It continues to feel soooo good.

uniball posted:

OK. I'll explain my situation first so I don't come off quite as vindictive/unstable as the actions alone convey. If you just want the meat of it, skip down to The actual story.

I'd been working at an extremely busy downtown Apple store for a little over two years, as a technician ("Genius") the entire time. I had just gone through my second annual performance review, this one by a former Lululemon manager wearing a Power Balance bracelet who let me know that I'd be getting a 2% raise, which I should be grateful for as it's "standard", and suggested that I if I want something better next year I should focus on raising my Net Promoter Score and "developing better relationships with my peers". The last part was one of many indications that advancement (to the maximum levels of Trainer or Manager) was accelerated by informing management which of your coworkers weren't loyal party members behind closed doors.

I had been very unhappy for at least a few months - my schedule was unbelievably unhealthy, I was regularly spoken to for things like 'not saying hello to people' and 'not being a team player', which I believe were code for 'please stop emoting anything other than saccharine happiness while at work'. I felt, and the other technicians generally agreed, that I did a great job getting my hands dirty and troubleshooting tricky issues in depth. I did research, learned new things, and spent extra time fixing people's bizarre hard-to-diagnose problems instead of just wiping their machines or checking them in for "tests" that often involved leaving a 10-hour youtube video playing overnight to see if it crashed. To be repeatedly told by management that I'm not doing good work when I and my coworkers feel that I am was infuriating. In addition to all of my personal incompatibilities, it was early 2013, Apple was more successful than ever, and the sheer volume of repairs and appointments resulted in pretty extreme pressure on the technicians to get unrealistic amounts of work done in an 8-hour day. Appointments were changed from 15 minutes long to 10, with the expectation that in addition to handling anything from simple how-tos through "my wireless drops exactly once every 20 minutes" style questions within the appointment time, we'd multitask and have more than one appointment going at once.

The poor performance review in context with everything else finally kicked my rear end into looking for a real job. I spent a couple months applying and interviewing, and eventually got a jr. sysadmin job working with some people who had quit my store a few months earlier. Between the final interview and signing the offer I think I burned 8 of my 10 sick days, all in late February/early March. I wonder if Apple (or anyone else) uses heuristics to see things like this coming. I wanted some serious catharsis from leaving this toxic dump so I agreed (on a Wednesday) to start the following Monday. This meant I'd do my quitting on Thursday. I was scheduled to work 10am-7pm, so I planned to phone it in and give people free replacements all morning, then hand in my letter and walk out right in the middle of the mid-day rush.

Three pieces of background before the actual story: first, Apple's internal training materials are extremely self-obsessed - references to old marketing campaigns are constant. The one that stuck out most to me, due to the intense irony involved, was the 1984 Super Bowl ad. As described above, Apple Retail is a cesspool of propaganda, doublespeak, and groupthink, so it was unbelievable to see the uncritical worship of an ad campaign specifically referencing those as negative traits.

Second, there were 27" iMacs everywhere in the back of the store - used for punch clocks, breakroom computers, repair room workstations, and a few mounted to walls just for slideshows of recent 'company events' etc. Displayed on all of these iMacs as a screensaver was a newish program, I think it started in 2012, called 'iCredo', in reference to the Credo, a horrific mantra that we were given on a small folding card and encouraged to carry in our wallets. iCredo is/was a barebones social network - all you could do at the time was post "Credos" (??) to your coworkers, meant to be "Nice work selling all those iPads!" or whatever. When using the desktop site, you could browse to your coworkers' pages and see all of the Credos they'd received, and the screensaver on every back-of-house iMac just cycled through the 10 most recent posts for your store.

Third, ANY open expression of negativity or even the possibility of negativity was unheard of. I know this is the case in a lot of places, but it was overwhelming in Apple retail. When someone quit, or even when someone was fired, the all-store emails that went out referred to them "moving on in their journey" or "graduating". This insane article about Hubspot covers some nearly-identical corporate psyops. I can't express enough how shocking it would have been to receive an email with any kind of honest negativity at Apple.

The actual story: I showed up to work that day and made some preparations on my first break: I bought a copy of 1984 (two actually, one to keep as a souvenir) and wrote my resignation letter inside the front cover. I made myself a second account ("Meow Meow" for some reason) in iCredo, so that I could post Credos to myself. I wrote up a blunt all-store email from my @apple.com email to the store DLs and saved it as a draft. I then worked the rest of the first half of my shift, replacing every frayed power adapter and cracked iPhone for free and telling the surprised owner that it's because I would be quitting in a couple hours. I still remember having to repeat it a couple times to a girl who kept thinking she was mishearing me.

I treated myself to a nice disgusting burger for lunch, then walked back to the store. Instead of going back to the floor and taking my next appointment, I sat at a punch-clock computer and sent my email to all 300 employees, posted a bunch of Credos to myself that were simply "I quit!", and found my manager and handed him the copy of 1984 with my resignation letter written on the inside cover. Walking out through a hallway of monitors showing my smiling face with "I quit!" next to it was exactly as cathartic as I wanted it to be.

Here's some slightly redacted photographic evidence:



I heard back from similarly disenfranchised friends working that day that they almost immediately put the Genius Bar on hold for 10 minutes to have an emergency meeting regarding my sudden departure. Two of them were nice enough to send me recordings of that meeting that I treasure to this day, in addition to the damage control email that was sent as a reply-all to mine:

quote:

Hey Team

Although <uniball>'s departure is sudden, we have known that <uniball> has not had the best experience over the past few months. We have actively been working with <uniball> and it is disappointing to see him leave in this way. As you know the connections and relationships we build in the store are the foundation of our Credo and Apple. We may never understand why <uniball> left the way he did but I confident in the team that we have today.

Many of you have approached me over the last few weeks to tell me how excited you are about the experience you are having in the family room. Although we have many opportunities, our culture and performance is changing to one of success and resilience. Continuing to hold each other accountable to the environment you want to create is the key to our success.

Let's continue to keep our dialogue open and if you have any questions or concerns please feel free to reach out.

Thanks

<store manager>

I know "don't burn bridges" is universal advice regarding leaving a job you hate, but in my specific situation I'm positive it was the right choice. It continues to feel soooo good.

H110Hawk posted:

I hope you took a picture of the inscribed 1984 novel / resignation letter.

uniball posted:

Fiendish Dr. Wu posted:

Between uniballs sales training and adorais accidental data acquisition....

uniball posted:

I wasn't going to post it since my handwriting is so embarrassingly bad (especially writing on the inside of a paperback with a solid dose of adrenaline) but here you go

Tab8715 posted:

I'm not sure if i should be amazed or mortified with such a story.

rear end in a top hat posted:

Many of you have approached me over the last few weeks to tell me how excited you are about the experience you are having in the family room. Although we have many opportunities, our culture and performance is changing to one of success and resilience. Continuing to hold each other accountable to the environment you want to create is the key to our success.

Internet Explorer posted:

I hope you don't tell that story during interviews.

Internet Explorer posted:

I hope you don't tell that story during interviews.

DigitalMocking posted:

It was their user database.
In plain text.
Full names, addresses, credit card info and to my , a field labeled CVV2, fully populated for probably 80% of the records.



I immediately got up, locked my office door and tracked down the CTO to show him and wash my hands of that shitshow as soon as I could.

DigitalMocking posted:

(Not trying to be the one-up the other story guy)

I'll give you one to think about.

A few years back I worked for a cell phone payment processor for pre-paid cell systems. I was responsible for the network and several months into my tenure there our CISO up and quit, leaving me responsible for PCI in the interim. We were bringing on a large new client, one of the only large clients we didn't actually have. Part of the migration plan was for their current payment processor to send us a dummy file in .csv format of their database dump so we could import the company's user data into our databases. They had sent us several sample files with 50 records and each one was more hosed up than the last. Format was different, data rules were different, everything. Our CTO and the customer CTO got on the horn with the old processor and ripped their president a new rear end about delaying the process and trying to sabotage the migration. He promised they'd send a proper sample files with 50 users so we could run a test. Next step after that was getting their total user count so I could dummy up the 3.5 million records in the right format so we could plan for how long the migration would take.

A day goes by and I'm sitting at my desk, the old payment processor was in Isreal so time was always skewed hard. I get an email from their PCI guy labeled "users.csv.7z". This is supposed to be the sample file with the proper data structure and I uncompress it. First thing I notice is that its big. Like really huge. I'm curious, so I double click the file and it opens in excel. Excel throws up an error about there being too many records, but it loaded the first million and change.

It was their user database.
In plain text.
Full names, addresses, credit card info and to my , a field labeled CVV2, fully populated for probably 80% of the records.



I immediately got up, locked my office door and tracked down the CTO to show him and wash my hands of that shitshow as soon as I could.

Dark Helmut posted:

I want to have an exciting experience in MY family room.

go3 posted:

Im sure you can find some resources for that

uniball posted:

I then worked the rest of the first half of my shift, replacing every frayed power adapter and cracked iPhone for free and telling the surprised owner that it's because I would be quitting in a couple hours. I still remember having to repeat it a couple times to a girl who kept thinking she was mishearing me.

captkirk posted:

Uh, not sure this was the best idea. Doesn't that basically boil down to "and then I proceeded to steal from my job because I was quitting shortly"?

captkirk posted:

Uh, not sure this was the best idea. Doesn't that basically boil down to "and then I proceeded to steal from my job because I was quitting shortly"?

AreWeDrunkYet posted:

Not going to defend the behavior, but unless he was colluding and profiting with these people it doesn't rise to that level. Worst case scenario they ding or fire him for poor judgment calls in issuing replacements, and under the circumstances, who cares?

RFC2324 posted:

Anyone here have a TS clearance? How deep do they dig on that stuff?

For instance, will me crazy eve oriented twitter posts be held against me?

RFC2324 posted:

Anyone here have a TS clearance? How deep do they dig on that stuff?

For instance, will me crazy eve oriented twitter posts be held against me?

psydude posted:

For a standard TS, they'll go back around 10 years. Be prepared to dig up phone numbers and names of old acquaintances and neighbors who can verify that you lived places and were not spying for the Cubans. Bottom line: tell the truth about everything on the forms. Traveled to Europe and Asia during a gap year? Be prepared to list every single date you spent in every single country. Did some drugs? Great, put it on there. Had a gambling addiction for a while? Put it on there. Did you go through a period where you thought credit cards were free money? Put it on there. Because if you leave it off, and they find out about it, you're done.

For a TS/SCI, they'll go waaaaaay deeper. They'll build upon your initial contacts and will end up interviewing quite a few people without your knowledge, and they'll take a much deeper look at your foreign travel and any foreign contacts. They'll also take a much more indepth look at your financial history.

go3 posted:

theres a website where you can review clearance decisions and 'bad with money' is a pretty common theme in people that are denied

Tab8715 posted:

Isn't there a public listing of those whom where accepted into clearances with a summary similar too,

"Candidate graduated a Bachelors in Computer Science. Had sex with multiple prostitutes in San Francisco and used Cocaine.

Clearance Granted."

go3 posted:

theres a website where you can review clearance decisions and 'bad with money' is a pretty common theme in people that are denied

RFC2324 posted:

Its not relevant yet, but that is a little worrysome. I went through a little over a decade stuck on stupid(was with a woman with drug and mental problems, tho all I ever did was smoke weed) so going back too far and I start having to spend quite a bit of time explaining things.

Ah well, I'll find out if any of these applications get that far.

Kashuno posted:

welp there goes any chance of me getting clearance thanks teenage/early 20s me

Tab8715 posted:

Isn't there a public listing of those whom where accepted into clearances with a summary similar too,

"Candidate graduated a Bachelors in Computer Science. Had sex with multiple prostitutes in San Francisco and used Cocaine.

Clearance Granted."