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Company Accidentally Fires Entire Staff Via Email
redletterdave writes with an amusing tale of missent email. From the article: "On Friday, more than 1,300 employees of London-based Aviva Investors walked into their offices, strolled over to their desks, booted up their computers and checked their emails, only to learn the shocking news: They would be leaving the company. The email ordered them to hand over company property and security passes before leaving the building, and left the staff with one final line: 'I would like to take this opportunity to thank you and wish you all the best for the future. 'This email was sent to Aviva's worldwide staff of 1,300 people, with bases in the U.S., UK, France, Spain, Sweden, Canada, Italy, Ireland, Germany, Norway, Poland, Switzerland, Belgium, Austria, Finland and the Netherlands. And it was all one giant mistake: The email was intended for only one individual."
How so? It is generally a good thing for a company to be willing to get rid of unproductive employees.
Human Resource Departments: the single biggest brake on the World's economy. The reason for the lack of productivity, innovation and creativity in most large enterprises.
It's a job that nobody with a brain ever wanted to do. Actually, it's a job that nobody ever wanted to do. Nobody ever grows up wanting to work in HR. The only people who do work in HR, are those who have failed. And they bear a grudge.
Which explains why their inhumanity creates situations like this one, and so many similar situations. With the technology currently available, real managers can manage. HR staff need to be fired. All of them, everywhere. The world never really needed them in the first place, but there's no justification for having them now.
The first corporation that has the insight to fire all its HR people will wipe the floor with its competition within 5 years. They will have all the advantages of a small business, mixed with the power of a corporation. And they will have MUCH happier, more productive, employees.
I was an administrator for a medium size tech company in the early nineties, and we got this all the time. The problem was not with the technically inept, but with the engineers, who would commonly send emails with:
mail -s "some subject line text" user_name (left_arrow) textfile
This was the same company that had a homegrown script to delete a user from the system. (Not written, maintained or owned by my team, I hasten to say.) The script had inadequate error checking, and if an operator hit carriage return without entering a user name, the script would delete the entire home directory structure on several machines. It kept us busy.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
It happened when I was in support. I couldn't clock in. A told the manager about it and she was like, "maybe you got fired". We both had a good laugh about it because we were all on good terms. No mass layoffs were expected, this was the go-go 90s. Next day--still can't clock in. Manager is more serious. "I'll have to look into this". Sure enough, somebody fat-fingered me off the payroll.
It was actually a good thing--I got paid for my accumulated vacation hours. They couldn't figure out how to charge them back to vacation. They "re-hired" me and I got money. The vacation hours started accumulating from zero; but I had just taken a few days so I didn't mind saving up again. The money came in handy.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Actually, this country was built by rich and educated local leaders (elites, if you will), who were the doctors and lawyers of the country. They already had the respect and trust of the population, seeing as they were the aristocracy of the time.
While many were amateur politicians, the truth was that many had served in local pre-existing legislatures and were sent as senators or ran for higher office.
Yet more proof that the Tea party crowd has no grasp of actual history (though they have a romanticized fictional version).