About 20 years ago… My company decided to force me to work overtime. Like, a LOT of overtime. At one point, I had worked 36 hours, without a break, and I had started to vomit from my migraine headache. The OWNER of the company drove over and demanded that I keep working until the job was done. I politely explained that I might need to go to a hospital if I keep working. They said I had a choice to make, keep working or get fired. So.. I kept working and did not get fired, but still only made it another 3 hours.
I was horrified that they would abuse an employee like that. I felt like an H1B visa hooker.
I asked for compensation for the overtime. All I wanted was a day or two of vacation time for all the extra work. Or a small bonus. I explained that they kept a multimillion dollar contract AND won a new one worth 5 million – because of my hard work. Because I personally fixed and built their prototype handheld scanners in less than 3 days. They laughed it off and I got nothing. No bonus. No vacation days. They handed me a piece of paper and pretended it was an award. Big hand waving and smiling, and no money. Nothing. I had basically revitalized her entire business and they expanded after that. I even tested the first RFID in the world for their people.. on a non existent contract…. and no money. It never happened, apparently.
What she didn't realize is.. I ran their entire IT department. I had direct access to all the IT systems. So the solution was simple. I went into the database and added some vacation days, and deleted a few from my boss, and made sure there was no trail. Then I scheduled a vacation and made sure they knew how many days I had remaining. When my vacation was over, I then picked their locks, took all the hard copies of my HR paperwork from their offices, and added more vacation days. I then scheduled ANOTHER vacation. They KNEW I had given myself extra days, but they couldn't prove it. So they had to let me do it. I took 4 days instead of 2 because they actually owed me for travel and shit. They got so fucking pissed. I'm not sure what happened after that, but I left a month later. =) After I got paid for my overtime and personal equipment. Actually, I never got paid for my inventions.
The moral of the story is… Don't treat employees like dogshit, and they won't be forced to get their money back and leave you ASAP. =) They lost the best god damned employee they ever had. I once worked an extra 160 hours in a month and slept in the rafters. The ceiling of the business, so I could save time on sleeping and eating. lol.
I didn't sabotage anything. But at the end, they were so cheap that they didn't want to buy any new equipment, and it started to risk the integrity of their critical systems. I chose to let them be the cheap assholes they were, and I'm quite certain they lost their entire code repository after I left. They had bought the cheapest hard drives on earth. And surprise! They all failed. I *could* have told them that those particular drives are dogshit. But nah. They said they wanted the cheapest. And that's what I gave them. =)
Just thought you'd giggle… thinking about the IT guy clicking in the DB table viewer… adding vacation days… never getting caught. =)