Apologies if this doesn’t fit, but it made me upset.
I work for a popular home improvement store in the US that has a blue logo. I don’t mind the job because I make more than I would otherwise considering my work history and skill set, $17.50/hr which is the max at my position. I like some of the people I work with and the job keeps me in shape. I am lucky to have a supervisor and manager that care about me as a person and are understanding when I need time for family or mental health crises. That’s where it ends.
Earlier this week, I got an email from an account posing as the CEO of the company (first name was changed to something similar, think Charles to Charlton). I only knew it was fake because I happen to know the CEO’s name from a poster in our training room. I, and most people here, don’t care about the company enough to know the name of anyone outside the store. The email discussed a “special bonus incentive” and provided a link with more information about receiving said bonus. As I knew it was a fake account, I reported it as spam and moved on. I did hear a couple other people talking about their excitement at the possibility of a needed extra bonus outside of the quarterly $300 bonus we get as full-time employees.
Enough people must have gotten excited and clicked through the link because by the next day we got another email. This one was from the security team from our corporate office. The spam had been a phishing exercise to test our security practices, as I’m sure is commonplace at large companies. They sent a half-baked apology for “being in poor taste” by sending an email about bonus incentives from an account to people struggling to live on their pay. Fuck whatever moron in an office thought up the idea of trolling ground-level employees with special bonuses from a person whose name most of them don’t even know. I know it’s not a groundbreaking story, but it really upset me to see the people who had been genuinely hopeful realize it was all a lie.