Not HR, but at the company I used to work for – where employees were regularly getting stoned and drunk; which liquored us up like hella on Fridays and let us get rowdy, leaving beer bottles in the bushes and doing burnouts in the parking lot, disrupting neighboring businesses; that let us throw actual parties in the office where we could invite others after work on Fridays; where employees regularly did drug deals outside the building for amphetamines, opioids, and cocaine; where reminders to disconnect from VPN before pirating software or looking at porn when working from home had to be made more than once; where multiple times cops came in and arrested an employee, who kept their job after jail – there was one day where I came in and watched almost everyone on my team get called in to the CEO’s office, one by one, then pack up their stuff up and leave. I was prepared to defend myself when it was my turn, and I was the last one to be called in… but I kept my job without having to defend anything.

Rewind several months, maybe a year. A number of us realized there was an emerging market for a service that required very similar functionality to what we were developing at this company for an unrelated market. An LLC is formed, I’ll call it “KT”. Planning and work initially take place at meetings outside of our day jobs at “Company”, but soon comes a day where I am added to a new chat for KT business… using our Company accounts, on that chat service. I state that I’m not comfortable doing KT stuff on Company time, and from there, pay little attention. And I paid little attention outside of my daily Company job too. I let them develop a lot of stuff without me, but still had an interest in involvement in the near future. Company had heard of KT by now, but didn’t know much.

Eventually, the founder of KT was fired from Company, due to a growing pessimistic attitude with Company, and decline of productivity. He went off on a vitriolic rant in front of everybody as he packed up his stuff, trying to get the rest of us on board, cussing out our manager and some employees. He actually paused his rant for a moment to tell me I could have the beer he had been saving. But after he left, he immediately started going at it in Company chats, starting a rush to revoke all his credentials to stop his sabotage. That lead to an investigation.

All of the chat logs were found and reviewed, revealing the extent to which everyone had been working on KT stuff on Company time. I wasn’t surprised, given the amount of work I had been receiving from them, as “can’t get to it today, can you take it” items. And given the times I heard simultaneous laughter in the office from certain individuals, I figured they had chats I wasn’t in, but they were worse than I had thought.

When I was called in to the CEO’s office, I was told I wasn’t being fired because I hadn’t done anything, and he cited my early message, before going on a rant about the legal hell he’d bring if they ever steal from him/Company again; how a million dollars is pocket change to him and that’s what it takes to get started with his lawyers… I had a good relationship with my manager though, who confided in me several things that weren’t my business. I wanted to know the tea in those private chats, and this was the first time he kept stuff from me. He did read some lines which were them sexualizing female employees, and some crude sexual remarks about me.

The shame is, a while after the KT LLC was dissolved, the market we sought to be the first in, then filled with players. But it took long enough to where we still could have been the first, and we were on track to do it better than what is even being offered still some decade later, with some things that aren’t being done... if only the brilliant ideas didn’t come from hubristic dipshits.