This is a very old story, I had completely forgotten about it until recently. I thought it fit well here.
Back in 1997 A PC manufactory had established itself as a decent company to purchase PCs from and reportedly to work for. It was my first IT job and it enabled me to move out of my parent's house, so I was all in.
I was enjoying myself for the most part during training. I was doing something I wanted to learn, and I was happy with the difficulty as it was the right kind of challenge. A person I’d just met convinced me to join him on the grave shift. I reluctantly agreed initially. I am glad I did it later.
My shift started at 9:00 pm and after a few weeks of training, I started noticing a disconnect. A lot of the employees who worked swing were very disgruntled about things. Burnout, I thought originally. Then one day I overheard a conversation that to me was shocking.
“No, I don’t work here, I’m a volunteer.” … “I think they all went home I can check though.”
The guy stands up and says “Hey are any employees left here? Or is it just us volunteers?”
Someone down the row “Naw the employees left hours ago.”
“No sir they’re all gone you’ll have to call back tomorrow.“
He wasn’t afraid of being fired, because they don’t really pay attention and he didn’t care.
As time went on, I started to notice more and more of this kind of thing. This was shocking to me, and I didn’t know what to think of it at the time. Until it came time for reviews and raises. Raises I was promised and didn’t get, along with PTO and sick time that wasn’t being credited for and wasn’t being discussed.
There were some huge, disgruntled issues where the administration did not give two shits about the employees, the working conditions, and how angry people were for sitting on the phone on hold for literally hours. To be told that the service agreement doesn’t cover acts of God, and therefore we’re under no obligation to fix their machine and honor the extended warranty they paid for. Even tho the issue that they are having was a manufacturing flaw that we all knew about, we weren't allowed to “fix it.”
This wasn’t just an IT call center, it was a sweatshop. Literally thousands of calls in the queue all day long. With over 2k employees on the phone all day long. They were more concerned about people going over on breaks than they were about the employees getting paid properly. Week after week after week random employees didn’t get paid, and they might get their check a few days later, maybe. At one point they added a “Bonus incentive structure” people who scored “Perfect scores” for a quarter would get a 2k bonus. Which in 1997 was a ridiculous good bonus. It was never paid out because it was literally never earned. The metrics were not just perfect Customer satisfaction scores, but also when we got QA’d we had to ace those as well And complete all calls in 12 minutes or less. When you take almost 100 calls a day, over 3 months. There’s no way you’re going to get perfect scores. We were doing End user support for first-time PC owners. The number of times we had to teach people the difference between and left and right mouse click was brain numbing. A lot of people claimed this offer to earn a bonus to be lip service, It was purely a dog and pony show for PR. Most people didn’t doubt it at this point.
Enter Kevin Stevens.
Kevin Stevens was the model employee. Nearly Perfect scores, nearly perfect stats, but not so good they'd get noticed. He had a dedicated desk (Most of us did not.) He started being talked about in middle management ranks as a model employee. But the more Kevin was there, the more disgruntled everyone else began to get. Because now there was some who they could be compared too. Over a couple of months, the grumbling got very bad. The administration decided to have an MVP program. People needed to vote for their favorite person whom they felt provided the most value to the “Team”.
The prize was a very expensive dinner and theater and a trip somewhere plus a reward of cash. They spoke of it like it was the company acknowledging the hard work of its employees and their desire to give back to the workforce.
A very small percentage of the employees loved Kevin, and It was starting to become clear to several of the managers that Kevin was winning by a landslide. The evening before the announcement of Kevin winning MVP, one manager decided that enough was enough. He told a couple of employees that he was sending an email to upper administration that Kevin stevens is likely to win and he cannot be announced as the winner.
Why?
Because Kevin Stevens was not a real person.
Most of us on the late/Grave shift knew who created Kevin and why. Kevin was created to demonstrate that a fictitious employee could be created and walk through the loopholes of the organization without any assistance from its creators. Kevin didn’t just walk, but he ran.
He had a badge with a face stolen from the internet, A phone, a login, a Mail tower, and a dedicated desk. There were several managers upset that Kevin had a mail tower when they had employees who’d been there for more than a year and couldn’t get one.
The mail servers crashed overnight; the email that warned of Kevin Stevens not being real was never seen.
The creators of Kevin Stevens called it fate.
It wasn’t fate, The manager told the wrong person. A person who was part of a very bitter graveyard crew who’d be stiffed their shift differential for the last time.
Outlook had just been added to the network infrastructure. It was buggy and prone to issues. Automatic Forwarding rules were established, Someone somehow got a distribution group created under the name of the head of administration. With 40-ish names on it.
It went like this
1 email goes out to 40 people, and those 40 people automatically sent out 40 more emails, and those create 40 more emails. etc. etc. etc. Before too long everyone was sending and receiving thousands of emails every second. literally, hundreds of millions of emails were automatically created and forwarded. It took less than an hour to bring the exchange server screaming to its knees.
You might be asking yourself, where was the Graveyard Management while this was going on? One was asleep, they never stayed awake during the shift. One went home an hour after the admin left because he was bored. The last one, he sat back and watched it all burn to the ground.
The next morning, they rolled everything back to the last checkpoint, which was 16 hours previous. The creation of the distribution group who was in it and how it happened gone. all evidence was wiped out.
The administration sent out this huge flowery congratulations email to Kevin Stevens and came to find him on the floor to make a public show of it.
When Kevin could not be located, the company chose to lie and say that he had been located and was having personal problems. Instant knowledge of anger from administrators was known and the word was out that someone had broken company policy regarding Kevin Stevens. The head of Local Network IT And the Training departments went through audits, as Administration demanded to know who the makers of this were (as the local newspaper called him) “Phantom Employee”. The only thing the administration found is that every document was signed by “Kevin Stevens” Kevin not only was fictitious he gave himself the rights to everything in the building, and because Attrition was so incredibly high, no one questioned it.
The company did not acknowledge any of the bigger wrongs that had been discovered because of its own inaccuracy in locating this situation months before it got to this point. The company also failed to find out what is wrong on their end that would cause so many employees to vote against the system.
A very small percentage of employees knew that Kevin Stevens wasn’t real. I'd guess that less than 10% of the total 2k+ employees were aware. When the vote came around it did not take much for that <10% to push other people who were not aware that Kevin wasn't real, into voting for Kevin or just not voting at all. Because a no vote was still a vote for Kevin. Those few people who knew who created it protected those who did. The employees that did not know that Kevin was fictitious, had proof again that their employee doesn't take care of their employees. In their eyes, they saw an employee, with a public announcement of personal problems, not being assisted by his employer in any way. In fact, as a direct quote from Administration, the new MVP "will be able to represent Technical Support in ways Kevin can only dream about."
The company attempted to sweep the whole thing under the rug. The Prize that was promised was never awarded to anyone as “Punishment.” The bad press that came out about its “Phantom Employee” Went national, and that was the beginning of the end. The company abandoned the building in that location a year later, and they pulled out of the U.S. less than two years later.
Ignoring IT personnel is a bad idea.