TLDR: HR deactivated my work accounts and tried to tell me I had to repay 12 weeks salary (from parental leave), but because I forwarded an email to my personal account with the evidence to prove I didn't need to repay the money, I shut the conversation down.
I was working for the county, and they had a parental leave policy that would pay you for 12 weeks after having a new child, but you had a 6 month requirement to keep working or repay the money you received from the “benefit”. To be honest, I am pretty sure this is defined as slavery under the Peonage Abolition Act/13th Amendment, but I'm no lawyer; a lawyer specializing is anti-slavery laws would have a better idea than me… yet I digress… I still get a little emotional about the whole thing.
When my daughter was born, I had a conversation with someone in HR about timelines. We specifically discussed what day I had to return to work, and the exact days the 6-month period started and ended. At this point, I still didn't plan on leaving, but I wanted the exact terms of my contractual obligation in writing. Lucky for me, I forwarded this conversation to my personal email out of habit.
After I returned to work, my manager treated me like garbage. She wrote a poor performance review and claimed I was always a bad worker; this resulted in a PIP (Personal Improvement Plan), which is really a fancy way of saying we are going to fire you, but the Union requires us to jump through hoops before we do it.
I spent a good part of the 6 months fighting the PIP, which took two fronts. The first was disputing the basis of the PIP in the first place, and the second was meeting the performance metrics outlined in it. The performance metrics were a little hard to meet because they were well beyond anyone else in the office. Disputing the basis of it was more complicated, and involved building a retaliation case against my manager because I had great reviews before my leave. However, I was convinced I didn't want to spend most of my waking hours around these people, so I started looking for work.
When I came to the end of the 6-months, I had found a new job and had a start date set, so I put in my 2 weeks notice to leave the Friday after the 6 month mark. The day I put in my notice, my access to nearly everything was deactivated. Basically, I could log into my computer and use email/chat.
One day, my login credentials were deactivated and HR called a meeting where they handed me a letter (on paper) claiming I was leaving too early and needed to repay the benefit money; I responded by sending an email from my personal account (using my phone in the meeting) where that same HR person told me my contractual obligation ended a couple days before my end date. I told them to stop the nonsense, and if they wanted to continue this conversation I need a union representative and possibly a lawyer; I never heard about that again.
After that, I sat at my desk every day watching YouTube and browsing the web on my phone from my desk until I left. Occasionally, someone would come and ask me to do something for them, but I would almost always respond by telling them that I can't remember; however, sometimes I could describe where they could find it on a network share somewhere.