Sure, story time it is. I’ll do my best to keep this as brief and succinct as possible.

Long story short, I was contracted by this company on a retainer basis to serve as the company IT sysadmin. I was there to manage the whole business’ IT infrastructure from stem to stern, from the employee workstations to the email,VPN, web and file servers. I’m one guy managing ALL the IT for a 60+ employee, 5 location business, I’m the guy who has to make the phone calls on anything tech related involving the business, and I’m the guy tasked with rebuilding their server infrastructure because it’s upgrade year.

Things were going alright for the first few months on the job, I was getting great reviews and feedback from the company staff and things were progressing along nicely. My only complaint was that getting information or any sort of action out of the higher ups was like pulling teeth. Nobody could ever get the info I needed in a timely fashion. I would wait weeks, and often times months just for simple lists or required reports to be made to allow me to do my job. For example, despite weekly reminders from me, it took them a month and a half to get me a simple list of passwords/permissions for a few accounts on their server to allow me to complete various tasks they had requested of me. They would hound me for status updates on my work, but would act incredulous when I told them I was waiting on information on their end.

Here’s where it gets interesting: I had been interfacing with the 3rd in command at the company (he’s some sort of head department manager, who we’ll call ‘Bob’) and he had been alright. He was a bit of a yes man, but he at least was willing to actually listen to outside opinions and not take it personally. The CEO had seemed fine in my first meeting with him and the CFO when I was first asked to come in for an interview. When we discussed my credentials, past work and my IT “philosophy” they seemed very enthusiastic about my background and intentions for the company. The meeting went great and they officially on-boarded me the next day. However things got weird in my first one on one interaction with the CEO. I was staying late one evening performing an audit on some Windoze workstations and the CEO decided to stick around to lock up after me (they didn’t yet trust me with keys) and he insisted on trying to maintain a conversation with me, rather than just letting me work. During this banter, he readily admitted, and bragged about being a “sociopath”. He also kept bragging about how wealthy he was. It was pretty awkward as you can imagine. I could tell he was shit testing me throughout our interaction.

Work continued and I did my best to avoid him, as he weirded me out. As time wore on and work progressed, I grew ever more frustrated at the lack of urgency on their end at getting things/information to me in a timely manner. Bob would send me condescending messages demanding a verbose report on the status of “the server” (they have over half a dozen servers and several more networking appliances, but to him, it’s all one machine) each time I would write out a nice detailed, verbose report outlining everything they could possibly need to know, while also explaining the urgent need to get back to me with the requested information (password lists, permissions, files yada yada). But nobody would ever read my reports; I would ask Bob if he got a chance to read my last report and if he had an ETA on the requested info, and he would more often than not tell me he had not read it, and had no intention of reading it (even though he had requested it) and would completely ignore/dodge the question re ETA on info. I am very OCD and kept full copies of all emails/text messages exchanged between me and any company personnel so as to be sure I had proof of what had been said. I soldiered on, and continued to work on the things I was able to work on.

Then, the CEO started calling me. This shit got weird. He would call me and do some sort of weird attempt to mind fuck me, almost like he was trying to catch me in a lie or something. It was weird. He would basically call me up, and full on interrogate me about the work I was doing for them and would continually question my competence and would ask me “if I had what it takes to pull this off”. The first time he actually managed to skeeve me out when he called me up freaking out asking why “everything wasn’t up and running yet!?”. They had decided to give me only a couple weeks notice that they were moving offices, and that I would have to completely rewire their new location and ensure a smooth transition of all their servers etc to the new building. Well, Mr. CEO also somehow got it in his head that I had “agreed” to have their entire server upgrade cycle and their software migration (we were also moving a fuckton of services back in house instead of the cloud) all done, implemented and tested and ready to go before the official move in date. That’s right ladies in gentleman, he decided a planned multi month transitional plan should instead be performed in a couple weeks and retroactively decided that I had “agreed” to this timeline from the beginning. He would call me at least once a week and interrogate me as to the status of “the server” (again, not realizing we’re talking about over half a dozen different servers etc) and then oddly enough started freaking out about “the internet”. He was convinced that I was too incompetent to get every internet jack in the office working and connected to the router. He thought it was super hardcore and complex to connect the networking switches to the office patch panel. It was such an odd juxtaposition. This guy trusted me and thought me competent enough to make sure all their shit was FIPS compliant, but he thought I was too stupid to plug stuff into a patch panel!? The whole time he is questioning my professional competency, while insisting that he “has been doing enterprise level IT deployments since before you were born” and that I  “clearly didn’t know what I was doing here”. He then asked me if I had had a chance to get the ~80 or so cables for the patch panel ready to go. When I said I did, he said he didn’t believe me and then insisted that I allow him to come over to my house to retrieve the cables. Keep in mind, I live over 2 hours away from the town the office is located in. He was seriously willing to come make a 4 hour round trip to my house “to call my bluff” because he honestly didn’t believe “I had what it takes” to make sure those 80 CAT6 cables were ready to go. No Joke. I told him that I was busy, considering it was late Saturday afternoon and that I could leave them waiting outside on the porch for him if he was that concerned. He declined the offer, he fully expected me to wait for his arrival.

During my phone calls with the CEO, he would attempt to put on a “menacing” voice to try and rattle me, but he only succeeded in sounding like an asshole. He would try and threaten me saying “I don’t think you’re gonna have the $20k a day the insurance company is going to be looking for when our internet isn’t working”. He was convinced getting the internet to work was too complex a task for me. He also couldn’t understand why I couldn’t “put a rush order” on getting the new server infrastructure up and running before the move. I had to explain to him in agonizing detail why that was unfeasible and reckless, and also how even if I could do it, I was still waiting on information from Bob to facilitate the requested work!

Anyways, the move goes off without a hitch and we initiate a major clean up of their Windoze workstations. These machines were in the worst shape I have ever seen in my life. I’m talking full network wide, passwordless sharing of the C drive ( dozens of folders marked “Confidential” were available over the public wifi), unauthenticated RDP, Windows Firewall disabled on every machine, every machine set up as a quickbooks server (and the companies master quickbooks server/file hosted on a random employees workstation without any backups ever taken) and of course, no antivirus enabled “because it kept breaking things”. Things were so bad I brought in an outside Microsoft subcontractor I know who does crackerjack work. He was appalled at the deplorable conditions their Windows machines were in. It was obvious routine maintenance had not been performed in years, if ever. Much of March and April was spent auditing, documenting and then completely gutting and fixing every workstation in the company and fixing their horrendous Quickbooks setup.

Long story short, many many hours of work was performed. I started getting worried as May was fast approaching and I still had yet to be paid for March, and my April bill had been sent out weeks ago. The company kept handing me oodles of work, and I kept inquiring as to the ETA on my cheque. They kept saying “it’s on its way” and “we’re sending it ASAP”. I’d been putting in serious hours, but now I was getting worried. I had to pay for my March rent from my savings, and now it seemed it would be the same for April. They kept telling me it was coming asap and that I have nothing to worry about. So I kept working because I trusted them. Then one day, after the full Windows audits had finally been completed, they ghosted me (I primarily work remote, and only go into the office a handful of times each month). Then May rolls around and still nothing.  Nobody would answer my calls and when they did, nobody could give me any information but “they would pass along my inquiry to somebody who would have the answer”. Now I’m really fucking worried. I’ve totally nuked my savings with the expectation that my 2 months salary is in the mail. I start calling around trying to get info about what the issue is and why I’m not getting paid (I was on the hook several grand for the subcontractor too) and I needed to get paid.

A relative of mine who does some unrelated business with the CEO managed to get a hold of him and ask him what was happening re me. The CEO then proceeds to tell him that I “have been ripping them off and that I had charged them entirely too much for a single server!”. This was the sociopathic CEO’s historical revisionism at play again. He had somehow gotten it in his head, that I had not been hired as a full time sysadmin, but had instead been “contracted to perform a single job, which was migrating the servers”. The CEO told my relative he intended to sue me for over $30,000 (small claims court maximum in my area) and that I was a no good swindler. He even wanted to sue me for the server hardware he had purchased since my hiring! He believed that every dime he had paid me had been for just migrating their servers, when this couldn’t be further from the truth. Much of my billed hours were just for fixing their deplorable Windows workstations, not migrating the Unix servers. But again, CEO didn’t believe they had half a dozen servers, in his eyes, it was just a “single server”. I keep trying to contact them, but they refuse to speak with me, but they will speak to my relative. Relative passes along to me that they have hired an outide 3rd party consultancy firm to perform a “deficiency report” on my work to analyze where I “have overcharged them”. They refuse to acknowledge that I am still waiting on Bob for password lists so I can migrate some of there servers. The CEO/company will only speak to my relative, not me and they insist that it is I who is causing all the hold ups and that they intend to sue me for every dime they’ve paid me. The CEO insisted and tried to convince my relative, and thus me that I had only been contracted to perform a single job (why did he agree to pay me an ongoing retainer then?). He totally tried gaslighting me and did his damnedest to get in my head and convince me of his distorted view of reality.

How did your humble narrator deal with this you may ask? I had every piece of correspondence saved and all of my work heavily documented. In speaking with the CFO over the phone, he admitted that the CEO was indeed being a ridiculous sociopath who had decided to turn on me. I sent along supporting documentation showing text messages where Bob admitted to not having read my reports, and it shows emails where Bob acknowledges that he knows I am waiting on him. The tables were then totally turned. They thought they would be able to stiff me my $10k fee for 3 months work for myself and a months work for the subcontractor AND sue me for $30k! Get real! I send along to them a brief snippet of some of the damning saved communications I had with them showing their hypocrisy and lies, and wouldn’t you know it, after a quick letter from my lawyer, they’ve promised to pay me! These fucks were just hoping I would walk away from all this because I was spooked about them threatening to sue me. All of this because one day the CEO looked at the total IT budget spent to date one day, and thought that the entire IT budget had gone solely to me, to migrate 1 server. No joke. Can’t make this up.