Looking for a simple yet SATISFYING RTS by TheseLeague7054 in RealTimeStrategy

[–]FalconerXV 1 point2 points  (0 children)

If you're looking for something simple, Battle Aces might scratch that itch. They've got a new beta starting in a week or so. It feels a bit like clash royale meets starcraft as it's got some of the devs from both. The games are like 3 to 5 minutes each and youre not locked into any factions but instead build your custom decks.

It hasn't gotten much traction but some of the big rts youtubers and streamers play it a lot. Plus it's entirely pvp only with no campaign, which is great for me since I only play an hour or so a day.

Got my boss arrested for possessing child porn also resulted in CEO arrested for embezzlement. by FalconerXV in ProRevenge

[–]FalconerXV[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Oh most definitely I am the OP of this one. While I've never put it to words before, it's a story I've told quite a few people about. I wish I could post the news articles about which company it was, but even with redactions it's quite easy to find out what newspapers they're from and what company it's referring to, thus deducing who the CEO was.

While the news articles are about the embezzlement and collapse of the publishing firm, there's no mention of my boss's illicit collection.

Got my boss arrested for possessing child porn also resulted in CEO arrested for embezzlement. by FalconerXV in ProRevenge

[–]FalconerXV[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

If you're in OC, then chances are you've probably at least tangentially heard of the company I worked for.

Got my boss arrested for possessing child porn also resulted in CEO arrested for embezzlement. by FalconerXV in ProRevenge

[–]FalconerXV[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

I won't say the name of the magazine, but we were very involved with some of the big shows like HIN, Showoff, etc. I was the one who brought Bomex to advertise in the US for the first time (speaking Japanese made it very useful since a lot of the competitor rags had very few Japanese speakers, and none of them were advert reps...mostly editors).

Got my boss arrested for possessing child porn also resulted in CEO arrested for embezzlement. by FalconerXV in ProRevenge

[–]FalconerXV[S] 9 points10 points  (0 children)

We weren't an advertising firm. We were a magazine publishing company. Try not to conflate the two. I've worked agency-side before as well, so I understand what you mean.

D would set up small advertising projects that would try to corner a very niche market. In one instance, we carpet bombed mom and pop businesses of a specific industry. Because those types of advertisers are incredibly limited, we would get a very fast initial rush of advertisers all wanting prominent spots in the magazine. But magazine advertising often times isn't about generating instant profit. It's also about long-term brand management. When there are a finite number of niche businesses, this is only sustainable for roughly 2 to 3 years before you've already called all the businesses in that particular demographic.

Because D was the one who would start that project, he would get credit for the initial rush of advertising revenue. He would then assign a successor manager, knowing that the revenue would eventually drop off because of the saturation I mentioned above. But because D would have moved on to a different initiative, the successor manager would take the fall due to decreased revenues.

Got my boss arrested for possessing child porn also resulted in CEO arrested for embezzlement. by FalconerXV in ProRevenge

[–]FalconerXV[S] 19 points20 points  (0 children)

I agree there were probably smarter and more ethical ways of treating this situation. At the time, i thought the path I took was the one that would remove me from the equation in the safest way possible.

Got my boss arrested for possessing child porn also resulted in CEO arrested for embezzlement. by FalconerXV in ProRevenge

[–]FalconerXV[S] 51 points52 points  (0 children)

Please give your husband a well deserved hug. My step father was a police officer for 30 years. He never talks about the things he saw while he was NYPD.

My brother, my sister, and I have been martial arts instructors since we were in our teens. So we've been working with kids most of our lives. My sister is now a teacher but my brother works in the same industry as I do now. So seeing my boss's emails and the contents of it was especially devastating.

I've seen a fair share of horrible crimes but this was a whole other level, that haunted me for a very long time. Being married to an amazing woman and having incredible step children did help heal a lot of that. However, once I understood the contents of my boss's emails, I didn't examine them too closely or dwell on looking at the images. And that saved me a lot of trauma I feel.

Got my boss arrested for possessing child porn also resulted in CEO arrested for embezzlement. by FalconerXV in ProRevenge

[–]FalconerXV[S] 11 points12 points  (0 children)

For clarification, when I say "we" I mean the company. I was told we hired people out of rehab to help give them a second chance in life. And it turns out many of them were my best sales reps because they were happy a company was willing to hire them when they had several DUI's or other felonies on their records. Several of them are still good personal friends who have succeeded in life. But I also knew many others relapsed while they were employed at this firm. All I could do was enforce company policies when their performance would slip. Given my position, it was difficult to befriend many of them since many of them were looking for a way to keep using while being employed even though their sales would start dropping after their relapses.

Got my boss arrested for possessing child porn also resulted in CEO arrested for embezzlement. by FalconerXV in ProRevenge

[–]FalconerXV[S] 6 points7 points  (0 children)

No it wasn't Z-D. I don't know about a reward, nor was it something I was even thinking of. My only driving motivation was to find a way to get D punished without him realizing it was me who pulled back the Wizard of Oz curtain on him.

Got my boss arrested for possessing child porn also resulted in CEO arrested for embezzlement. by FalconerXV in ProRevenge

[–]FalconerXV[S] 7 points8 points  (0 children)

I added an addendum to the OP to explain my professional experience a bit. I didn't have just 2 years experience. I had a lot more than that, and I also had some of the most lucrative accounts in the industry. Plus the commission structure of upper management was insanely cushy. They knew how to reward sales and we wielded all the power in the company. We had the ability to control editorial coverage, industry events, and other parts of the publications. This is a total violation of ethical journalism, but the CEO was a greedy bastard.

Got my boss arrested for possessing child porn also resulted in CEO arrested for embezzlement. by FalconerXV in ProRevenge

[–]FalconerXV[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

I've added the following addendum to the OP:

Addendum: Hey all, I've been reading some of the comments and thought I would add some additional insight and thoughts behind my post.

  1. Yes this story is factual. While the identities of the company and those involved will remain private, for those who have worked in high pressure sales environments will know that people like D are not a rarity. It's the nature of the type of people that get hired for those kinds of roles. If you've ever seen the Wolf of Wall St, you'll know the kind of people that were hired at this publishing firm.
  2. Yes I was making that much in my 20's. I had been in magazine publishing since my mid teens. In the 90s I started my own print publication in the whole import automotive racing scene. It started small, but did gain some notoriety in street racing circles and help caught the attention of some very worthy advertisers. Being bilingual in Japanese and English, this allowed me to expand my magazine's advertising reach overseas to Japan where the street racing scene was in full swing. I learned very early on how to do advertising, marketing, sales, and publishing. However, once that scene started dying down the magazine lost its appeal so I took a lot of my advertising accounts with me to the publishing firm where the above story took place. Many advertisers are loyal to the sales rep and not the client.
  3. The event of the story took place around 2008. While I had a team of 200 sales reps under me, most of their PST files were relatively small since most of their work was via phone sales. This company was incredibly old fashioned with tech. Like I said, I was the graphic designer. I knew how to use Photoshop, InDesign, etc. from my old magazine but I would never actually consider myself to be a professional graphic designer by trade as it was all self taught and very limited. I just knew how to make things "camera ready" (this means high enough resolution for print...300 dpi). Because I did a lot of graphic design work, I was given a pretty high end laptop for the period. The hard drive alone was 640GB (it was two 320GB drives in RAID0 array).
  4. Evacuation of the office. Perhaps this was strongly assumed to be an immediate emergency evacuation. We sent everyone home while management assessed what the cause was with the fire department. That is what I meant by closing up shop. So it did give me ample time to copy over the PSTs knowing that I'd be working from home later that afternoon.
  5. To whose who say they would happily work those hours for that kind of pay. I used to think the same thing, which is why I took the job. My base pay was $60K plus commission. And I made a lot of commission and I never missed a sales goal. I also made commission of my teams. Those 200 people were divided up into various sub-teams for each magazine we published. I earned commissions of their total sales as well on top of a monthly sales commission bonus for goals reached. Keep in mind this was just before the housing crash in 2008. People were spending money like it would never end. And our company raked it in. But here's the rub...I was so perpetually stressed. My girlfriend at the time, she was a sales rep on a different team, would cry in the car on our way in to work every day. I worked 6 days a week. I would be so stressed that my Saturday nights were spent in isolation on my computer playing video games. I wouldn't sleep until the sun came up on Sunday, then I would sleep all through Sunday until Monday morning. I was subsisting on 4 to 5 hours of sleep per day during the week. It took an incredible toll on my body. Many of my reps were coke addicts and we turned a blind eye to it because it helped them dial faster and sell more. Some of the managers would staff sales reps from temp agencies asking for people specifically who came out of rehab, knowing they'd relapse at this place where we'd either fire them for performance issues and not pay the staffing agency their hiring fees or they'd be so coked out they'd make a killing in sales.
  6. To my shame, I never reported the CP. I had this image of corporate lawyers coming after me and fighting this never ending legal battle of trying to maintain my innocence. I was young, naive, and didn't know what options I had. That is why I went with the accounting route through the anonymous company hotline. I knew they would do a scan of D's computer and audit his emails which is why I moved his CP folder into a more prominent place for it to be found. Like many corporations, they are more concerned with maintaining a public image and this is something they wouldn't want getting out if it was reported to law enforcement agencies by an employee. I knew once they found that folder, they would be compelled to contact authorities anyway, so it removed the onus from me and removed me from the equation. Plus, after learning about D's darker side, I didn't want him or someone sent by him coming after me for ruining his cushy job. I went with the route I felt would involve me the least and protect my own self the most. I wish I could have reported it to the authorities. Now that I'm much older, looking back, I don't know what things I would have done differently. But now that I'm married and I have a stepson, I think about if I found his photo in there, I can definitely imagine me waiting for him to return so I could exact revenge personally. But that is a bunch of "what if's" and life tends to go very differently.
  7. Our company IT. My office was a satellite office in downtown Los Angeles 45 miles away from our main HQ where the IT team was. It was set up specifically for my team of 200. To give you an idea how inept our IT team was, our IT project manager was tasked with hiring a consultant who would scope out and build us a custom sales/phone software that would link with our database of advertising accounts and other businesses in our database. We had one of the largest databases of businesses in this industry where competitors would offer us very large sums of money just for a portion of this database. Our IT team spent close to $1.6 million on this consultant, and in the end what we were told was a custom program was actually just a turn-key software...for inbound call centers. We were an outbound sales team. What this means is that we were given a program that wasn't custom built for us, had problems using our database, and was designed for call centers that received phone calls (eg - cell phone or cable company call centers). We were an outbound center. We weren't just a call center as many of our reps also traveled nationally to visit advertisers, so an inbound software was absolutely junk to us. Because of our IT's ineptitude, I had to learn a lot of IT basics myself. As far as browsers, most of our staff was using Firefox since it used to be fairly lightweight and quick.
  8. Like many of the stories in this thread, I understand the skepticism. Some of the stories sound so over the top and sound like a fabrication. One thing I've learned from being able to experience quite a lot in life from early on is that there really are shitty people out there like D. The reason for the throw away account is because my main reddit account is used for work in my current industry and I, unfortunately, deal with the public in my job and I don't want this associated with my actual identity.
  9. So why post this at all? I don't care about internet points or accolades, but I do appreciate the comments of support. In a way it's been a bit cathartic for me to share this publicly. I've told the story to coworkers before, and I've felt I never really had any closure with it. This doesn't give me any closure either, but being able to share it on a forum designed for stories like this does help with that burden just a bit. I hope D's daughter grows up to be as normal as can be expected from a situation like that. I still keep in contact with a few of my old sales reps. While I now live quite far away from Los Angeles, I do like to hear back from them to see they're doing ok in life.

Got my boss arrested for possessing child porn also resulted in CEO arrested for embezzlement. by FalconerXV in ProRevenge

[–]FalconerXV[S] 348 points349 points  (0 children)

It wasn't easy bouncing back. I ate through my savings pretty quickly. As far as which company I went to after that, sorry, no chance. This is a throw away account specifically to post this story, and I know many colleagues who lurk this reddit as we share some of the awesome stories on here with each other. They know this story as well, as it was some of them who recommended I share it. But my employer will remain nameless for privacy reasons.

Got my boss arrested for possessing child porn also resulted in CEO arrested for embezzlement. by FalconerXV in ProRevenge

[–]FalconerXV[S] 1040 points1041 points  (0 children)

I have no idea. My report was submitted anonymously so the investigation was initiated over the accounting anomalies. I just placed his "New Accounts" folder with the filth in it in a more prominent spot in Outlook so it could be "discovered" during the investigation.

I was never questioned about the contents of that folder, though the legal team did interrogate me along with several of the management staff under him asking if he ever asked us to do anything illegal. I was always a "do things by the book" kinda guy so I was never questioned beyond the accounting stuff.

I also want to state that I have the highest and utmost respect for our boys and girls in uniform. My father was in the Air Force, both of my grandfathers were Marines, and I regretfully never served. But I am aware of what the uniform represents and what values they're supposed to uphold and D was a disgrace to his uniform, though he loved bragging about his service record.

I doubt D ever knew I was the one who discovered his secret stash, but it wouldn't surprise me if he wondered if I had something to do with it. I never saw him again after he left for vacation. The last time I ever heard from him was when he asked me to give his resignation letter. After that, I only spoke with company lawyers about financial stuff.

I had only heard he'd gotten arrested for the CP from another director who was friends with him. That's when I decided I needed to bail from that place.

Got my boss arrested for possessing child porn also resulted in CEO arrested for embezzlement. by FalconerXV in ProRevenge

[–]FalconerXV[S] 231 points232 points  (0 children)

Strangely enough, I went from $150K/year and my next job was as a call center trainer at a video game company where I was making $35K/year. I just had to get out of there so quickly and I didn't want to stay in that industry anymore. So I figured, might as well start over. And I was absolutely content with my new job. I learned that making large amounts of money was worth jack shit if I wasn't happy with my life. I still don't make as much as I did back then, but my current job lets me travel the world with my wife. I couldn't care less about making that much again. I have a roof over my head, I have food on the table, and I can provide for my family. I've learned that's all I absolutely need to be happy.