That’s why you don’t send in IT to do HR’s job

As IT pros, we deal with the tech side of a company, but the line between those tasks and personnel issues can be very faint. Here’s a story of when I made an assumption based on established patterns and kicked up a mess of an employee departure.

At the time of this story, I worked in IT for a 150-person wholesale travel company. The majority of the employees were reservation agents in their early- to mid-20s, most of them female, and office romances were not forbidden. You can imagine the drama that ensued on a regular basis, which was a source of vicarious entertainment for those of us doing routine IT tasks.

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A revolving door

But I digress. This story is about those of us — well, yours truly — who managed the tech side of these employees’ comings and goings. Due to a combination of youth, mediocre pay, low work ethic (of some), and office romances, we saw significant turnover from month to month. It wasn’t unusual in a two-week period to add five or six new employees, while also removing just as many from the various systems.

Our department was in charge of such tasks as imaging the computers and setting up email. Our main reservation system ran on an IBM AS/400, which meant we were blessed — or stuck, depending upon your point of view — with the Lotus Notes suite. We took advantage of the built-in databases and created a New/Departed Employee database to ease the process of tracking user setup.

There were unspoken rules about how this worked. When management notified us on a Friday to take someone off the system, you knew that person was getting their walking papers. On the other hand, when you got a request several days in advance of when someone was to be removed from the system, you knew that the employee had found another job and was moving on of their own accord.

A seemingly routine request

One Tuesday, I opened my in-box to find a user delete request from management. It was set to take place several days later on Friday, so I knew this employee was off to better things. I didn’t know this particular user well — we’ll call her “Matilda.”

Friday came along, and I was in the server room working on a typical maintenance issue: low drive space on our Notes mail server. Back in the days of smaller, expensive SCSI drives, Notes had an odd default behavior of automatically including attachments with every email reply. Meanwhile, our young users would constantly forward huge video clips to each other and to people outside the company.

Despite our repeated pleas, upper management had no backbone to put a lid on this type of behavior or even institute email quotas — perhaps in part because the CEO was the biggest offender. With every video sent and the requisite “That’s cool!” reply, the massive attachments showed up multiple times per user, and the drives regularly filled up.

The solution? Besides database compacting, we were told to open the email accounts of the biggest offenders, sort by size, and delete the largest attachments. It was tedious work, as we had to make sure we weren’t deleting any file of consequence in the process.

In the midst of this mind-numbing exercise, Matilda waltzed into the server room — incredible, yes, but our server room door didn’t even have a lock on it, so anyone could walk right in. I greeted her, asked her what she needed, and continued to delete more attachments. She mentioned that she had tried her Windows password three times and was locked out of her account.

While no physical lock protected the server room, management had, at my urging, agreed to put standard Windows domain policies in place. I punched the KVM button for the domain controller, unlocked her account, and went back to flushing out the Notes server.

Egg on a techie’s face

This wasn’t the first time in her short tenure that Matilda locked herself out, so I was slightly grateful this might be the last time I had to deal with it. She thanked me, and as she was ready to go out the door, I turned to make eye contact. “Hey, today is your last day, huh? Congratulations! What will you be up to next?”

Her mouth opened, but no words came out. Instead, a look of shock in her eyes told me something wasn’t right. I turned back to the monitor and knew I needed to change the subject, but all I could come up with in that brief moment was, “Uhhh … great weather we’re having, huh?”

Finally, she came to her senses and a single word escaped her lips. “What?!” she screeched as she bolted from the room. My heart sank when I realized I had just tipped her off to the fact that, even though neither of us knew it until then, she was getting fired later that day.

I made a quick phone call to Matilda’s manager, alerting her of my faux pas. Matilda had already made it to her desk and was told to go back to her own cubicle and wait. The poor girl sat there on pins and needles for more than half an hour before she got called over and was told to pack up her things.

Picking up the pieces

To say that I felt awful was an understatement. But was it really my fault? To avoid a repeat, we made sure to add a Comments section to the New/Departed Employee database so that HR could let us know if it was a friendly parting or an unfriendly firing. No further damage was done the rest of my tenure there.

Years later, I found myself still worrying about how Matilda fared. Thanks to the magic of social media, I see she eventually became a marketing manager for an online media company. Guess it could have been worse!

As always, there was a lesson learned. Never assume that because you see a pattern, future events will line up the same way — always expect things to be out of the norm. It’s a concept I embrace to this day but still forget sometimes. But that’s another story in the making.

Send your own IT tale of managing IT, personal bloopers, supporting users, or dealing with bureaucratic nonsense to offtherecord@infoworld.com. If we publish it, we’ll send you a $50 American Express gift cheque.

This story, “That’s why you don’t send in IT to do HR’s job,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more crazy-but-true stories in the anonymous Off the Record blog at InfoWorld.com. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.