My favorite part was how insanely petty the whole thing sounded... How he insisted his nickname should be "Badass" but people called him what you mentioned as well as "Voldemort" more often than his self appointed nickname... What a goof. If this article is accurate it paints a picture of an incredibly socially immature workplace where people who didn't advance past the point of high school in that aspect left the guy feeling bullied enough that he did the leak. This was something like my first and only experience doing government contracting at a large corporation, on my tour of the offices one of the things I pointed out to my boss were these print out clip art stop signs that said "STOP BULLYING" on the walls everywhere and that I hadn't seen something like that since high school. He rolled his eyes pretty hard at that one but these people were responsible for systems that enormous amounts of people's lives depended on. I remember when these systems failed multiple times over multiple incidences and just thought of the stop sign shit.
Hah. I was deeply struck by how immature the whole thing sounds.
Nobody here looks good, of course. But even top flight tech companies have this sort of time-wasting, so it's not exactly a surprise you'd find it at a TLA as well.
I got reprimanded one time at a previous job for pretending to throw a bee at my supervisor. A nest had formed in some concrete overhang in the building, he freaked out and got adrenaline ampules at the pharmacy (epipen shortage year) like "you need to inject me with this if I get stung". So later on, I walked up to him sitting next to a coworker with nothing in my hands and a shit eating grin on my face. "What's that?" "A BEE!" as I opened my hands with nothing in them... He fell over in his chair and everyone in the office stood up and pointed and laughed at him. It was ultra funny though he insisted I was insane for this and demanded I see a psychiatrist if I wanted to keep my job. Just ended up getting xanax pills I really didn't want or need. This was close to a decade ago and I wouldn't pull something like that now, but I mean what do you expect out of hiring people in their early 20s?
Look, I don't want to come off as judgemental, but it really wasn't funny. He was genuinely afraid of bees, perhaps bordering on a phobia. Whether that's a "rational" fear or not isn't important (although the epipen/adrenaline makes it sound like it's quite rational; people can die from bee strings), people have all kinds of fears and they almost never find practical jokes about them "funny". Even worse, you put him in the extremely uncomfortable and embarrassing situation where the entire office was laughing at him over it. It sounds like an absolutely horrible situation for him.
"What do you expect out of hiring people in their early 20s?" is a lame excuse. A 11-year old? Sure. A 21-year old should know better. We all make errors in judgement, but this really was a spectacular error, and some "official" response was entirely warranted.
That's funny, pretty much everyone else thinking him demanding someone see a psychiatrist over a prank thought his response was a bit over-wrought, especially the psychiatrist
I don't think we have those departments where I live except in American or Euro companies that do outsourcing, nor any "STOP BULLYING" signs around the office in this neck of the woods.
