e. My brother worked for a web hosting company for about 8 months. The company is run by a bunch of kids really, 20's and such. No real formal procedures or training. They just kind of take you and throw you in front of a computer. If you're lucky another employee will show you a thing or two and let you run with it. No real HR, just some higher up employee that does it on the side. The owner of the company started it in high school, he's only about 25 now. The lack of discipline and procedures seems kewl at first, but then it gets damned annoying. The supervisor of the tech support people is a real jerk, but best friends with the owner and his family loaned the owner a lot of money to help get the company started, etc. so he's there not because of skill. He's a real jerk, stuck up, conceded, etc. and most of the employees can't stand him. Anyways, back to topic.
After about 8-9 or months into the job, a reseller with a few dedicated servers requested an OS reinstall. My brother took the call, and filled out the form and submitted it to the colocation facility in Houston. He accidently put in the wrong server name though. So yes, an important server got wiped, with no backups of all the customer information or websites on the server. Needless to say, the customer was upset, and the company made an excuse that it was the colocation facilities fault. Anyways, my brother of course got chewed out, etc. and even demoted; but not fired. They then made a new procedure that all server OS reinstalls had to handled through the Level 2 admins or whatever. So a new procedure was put into effect, where there was none before. The company also told the customer they'd pay for a hard drive recovery specialist to restore the server back to it's pre-formatted condition. So the company did have to pay some other company to fix the server.
Anyways, my bro immediately started searching for a new job and within a week or so found one. The next day he went to work, with resignation letter in hand, he got called into the supervisor's office who chewed him out and ended with "So where do you think your future is with this company?" to which my bro responded "your right" and handed him the resignation letter.
A week later, on Friday, Pay Day, he goes to get his check, and it wasn't there. The excuse was some banking error occured and nobody got paid. He confirmed with a few other employees they hadn't been paid either. Which sucked because my brother began getting a few overdraft charges after that. The next week, all the employees got paid, except him. Over the course of the next month, all attempts to contact the supervisor or owner, email, calls, etc. were ignored. It's been almost 2 months now. My brother was concerned he'd have to drag a lawyer into this, etc. and even the threat of the lawyer didn't get their response.
Well yesterday he finally got ahold of the supervisor who says they'll go ahead and cut him a check; but that they're looking into charging him for the damages incurred. I guess they want to deduct the cost of the hard drive recovery service. He told them they can't do that, and the supervisor said he'd get back to him.
So... thoughts? Also, any relevant information he can print up and/or quote to them would be helpful. I think he's going to search thet department of labor's site tonight but if anybody has anything specific or a better place to start, that'd be great.
I personally think they can't do it. They have no established procedures, nothing written, no training, etc. how can he be in trouble for violation a non-existent procedure. And the procedure they made afterwards doesn't count. He believes the worst they could have done to him was fire him, which they didn't even do. But how to get that through their thick, stubborn heads. I personally wanted him to sue them, not only for the last pay check, but to include the overdraft fee's he incurred, and the cost of his lawyer, etc. but a friend told me that'll be more trouble in the long run. I'd just love to stick it to them. I worked for them for about 2 weeks before I quit, I realized then what a bunch of immature kids they were.
I mean, I'm 25, but even I realize the need for procedures, training, guidelines, etc. and some boundary's. I may not like the corporate thinking and the employees being drones, but I don't believe in the opposite end of the spectrum either. I like company's that find that happy medium. |
