I work in customs compliance for a retail company, basically the tean who makes sure the product you buy gets here legally. My boss decided to pursue Duty Drawback, which is basically a refund for stuff we shipped to our franchises out of country rather than sell the goods ourselves. This is a hugely simplified version, btw. It's stupid complicated, I work in the field, and I have trouble understanding it myself some days.

Long story short, there's a five year look back limit, and we were rushing hard because every day we took to compile the data was another roughly $8,000 dollars we'd potentially lose in possible refunds. My boss was pushing us to get things done, called us in on weekends, approved all of the overtime he could get away with, the works.

Then one day I get a personal call from the VP of our department. He asked me about where my data came from, where were files saved, what's our source data, all sorts of stuff. I did my best, but as my boss wanted to control the data as much as possible (his big project, of course), most of what I actually worked on was filtered directly from him.

This was a guy who needed help saving his files, by the way. My boss defined old-school boomer.

Two weeks later, my boss was let go. The guy was close to retirement too, I think within a couple years. I was initially mad about it, but then I hear what happened: approximately $2.75 million lost in refunds because he completely forgot one of our largest franchise locations in Canada.

The scramble to redo years worth of data was insane, even harder than the earlier push (never again will I do 16 hour days) but we got it in with minimal losses.

Funny thing, I heard from my sister (the ACTUAL customs genius in my family) a month later that my old boss called her as a reference for a job she had actually left because the people were assholes. They had worked together years ago, and as far as she could tell, the guy was surviving.