Hhmm.. had to pick between 2 different ones, both unintentional, but really satisfying.

First was when I was fired for my poor sales performance by a new manager. The area manager asked how the top sales assistant in the store had a poor sales performance. Turns out he(the new manager) had been told he had to lose a member of staff and he personally knew most of the other staff members and didn’t want to fire his friends. The “revenge” part was that the manager and the store got a full review from head office and the manager and one of the other full time staff were fired due to their findings.

Second was a little more explosive to the company itself, and sort of their fault. I was working in an office where I was pretty much the only person in my department that knew how everything worked. I also had quite close ties to several of our clients. Having worked with them for several years, I had gotten quite friendly with them. Anyway, the company I was working with treated most of its employees as disposable assets. I had, had enough of the work environment, and the attitude of HR so I handed in my notice. I was immediately pulled into a meeting with some of the high ups. Expecting some sort of “please don’t go”, I was not really surprised when instead I got handed a document to sign that pretty much said I was not allowed to let any of the clients know that I was leaving. I signed it, and worked my notice period. On my last day it became very apparent that the clients I had worked with had no idea that the only person that they really spoke to was leaving. Nothing I could do about it though, I had signed the paper and the companies clients weren’t going to be my responsibility, even though I felt a little bad about leaving them in the lurch.

Time passed after I had left the company and started at a new one, and I got a phone call out of the blue. From one of the clients I used to deal with at my old company. They had tracked me down through LinkedIn (free plug there) and wanted to know if I was interested in working with them again. I said yes, but wasn’t really in a position to do so at present. The same day, I got another call from another of my old contacts, again they had tracked me down. Turns out no one was replying to them from my old company and they were annoyed. So I thought what the hell, and started working freelance with the 2 companies that had contacted me. By the end of the first month, I was working with 6 of the clients that my old company had decided they couldn’t work with my old company and wanted to work with me directly. Since I hadn’t sort them out, they came after me. I couldn’t see any problem. That old company has closed the division were I used to work as they didn’t have enough work to justify keeping it open, and I worked freelance with my new clients for several years.

So be careful out there big name companies, annoy your clients and they will seek other people.