Note: although recent news stories caused me to remember this incident, it has nothing to do with the recent news stories and I am not making a political comment. This happened 40 years ago.
Years back I worked at a government contractor. Management was poor there, and my group had just lost out on a big contract. Although I was only a junior staffer (and was treated like one) during my yearly review my bosses blamed that contract loss squarely on me – because I had worked on that project for another company previously (and despite they had ignored my suggestions while preparing our bid). So I had given a two week notice.
I had several unfinished projects, so I made a folder for each one that contained all of the pertinent information and placed them in my filing cabinet. This included projects that actually were the responsibilities of coworkers, but my bosses allowed them to reassign their projects to me because I was not part of their clique. Most of the projects were waiting for outputs from other groups.
Before I left I offered to review the projects with my bosses and with the coworkers who would be affected, but none of them were interested. So on my last day I organized everything, did my security debriefing, and left.
About a month later, I received a panicked phone call from one of those coworkers who'd reassigned his project to me. He wanted to know details about a circuit connector pinout. I told him that he could find that on one of the schematics in the folder I'd left him – and that there were too many connectors with too many pins for me to remember. He asked me to look at my copy of the schematic. I told him that I didn't have a copy – the project was classified. He asked, “What do you mean you didn't keep a copy?” I told him he'd worked there longer than me and should be well versed with the government's and the company's security requirements.
Turns out, they'd lost all of my folders. At that company, when somebody left, other workers would scavenge furniture out of the empty cube – somebody wanted my filing cabinet so they'd taken it and threw away everything in it without bothering to check what it was. Oh well, sad for them…