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Huge Trove of Employee Records Discovered At Abandoned Toys 'R' Us (hackaday.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Hackaday recently engaged in a bit of urban exploration, taking a look inside of a recently purchased Toys "R" Us location that has been boarded up since the once giant toy store chain folded in June. Inside they found plenty of hardware left behind, from point-of-sale systems to the Cisco networking gear in the server room. But the most interesting find was on paper.
In a back office, they found "several boxes" of personal information about the store's employees, from their medical records to photocopies of their driver's licenses and Social Security cards [and also tax forms]. A video included with the article gives the viewer an impression of just how large a collection of files were left behind.
The author wonders if the situation in this particular store was a fluke, or if the other [800] Toys "R" Us locations were left in a similar state.
The article calls it "a very surprising look at what get's left behind when the money runs out and the employees simply give up...."
"We saw the great lengths the company went to protect customer information, so to see how little regard they had for their own people was honestly infuriating."
In a back office, they found "several boxes" of personal information about the store's employees, from their medical records to photocopies of their driver's licenses and Social Security cards [and also tax forms]. A video included with the article gives the viewer an impression of just how large a collection of files were left behind.
The author wonders if the situation in this particular store was a fluke, or if the other [800] Toys "R" Us locations were left in a similar state.
The article calls it "a very surprising look at what get's left behind when the money runs out and the employees simply give up...."
"We saw the great lengths the company went to protect customer information, so to see how little regard they had for their own people was honestly infuriating."
In my experience, I've always had to clean out old papers and trash when moving a business or business group into a "new" office. Much of that was just moving a group around within the facilities of a large corporation (one of the Dow 30), but, you'd think that would be better because the folks that moved out weren't losing their jobs.
I've actually encountered the same thing with houses. I've done some flipping, and it is remarkable how many people leave almost everything.
One home I rebuilt had been the home of a family with at least two young children. All of the clothes were still there, toys left where they had last been played with, kitchen fully stocked, dishes in the sink, bills in the drawers, all of the normal bathroom stuff in the bathroom, family pictures on the walls and in photo albums, and on and on. In my imagination, I figured they had been in a wreck or something where everyone died. I checked just to satisfy my curiosity and found that they had decided to move to Europe and just abandoned everything they couldn't take with them on the plane.