I wasn’t fired - but was given an impossible task the afternoon of my last day.

I had been working at a game company as tech support person. They were high-flying for a while, producing really sophisticated educational games for children. But then they ran out of money and starting cutting - and cutting and cutting. Eventually they “merged” with another educational game company, but after the merger was complete it turned out BOTH companies had been “less than forthcoming” (to put it mildly) about their financial states - and the newly merged company sunk even faster. They fired most of the staff and most of the programmers, then brought in an “axe lady” CEO to basically screw over everybody as much as possible and close out the company.

So, on the last day, with a very few employees left, the CEO showed me an adjacent warehouse stacked high with PCs (they had all been leased, and needed to be returned), and told me I needed to wipe them to “government zero”. Not sure that was an actual thing, but the gist was that I should boot every single PC, and run a program to completely erase the hard disk (after setting it up with a monitor etc) taking a couple hours for each one. It would have taken me all night and probably the weekend to do this alone (I was the only tech person left) - and I wouldn’t have been paid for the time.

She left, and I looked at the huge pile of PCs and thought no WAY am I going to waste my time on such a stupid task. So, instead of going through that work, I simply opened each PC, and pulled the hard disk from each one. In a couple hours I had a big pile of hard disks, and loaded them into the drawers of my desk, and went home.

I got a call a couple month later. Eventually the leasing company noticed these PCs didn’t have hard disks, and had called some executive at the company who called me. It wasn’t the CEO - probably she took her bonus and was long gone. I told them they were in the desk (who knows if the desk was even still there). They said “ok thanks” - and I never heard from them again.