One thing that I find very annoying is previous employers who didn’t respect you when you worked with them, and now that you are gone, they continue to harass you for information without paying you for your time. I left an employer on very bad terms – enough that they gave me five minutes to clean out my office of five years and was told that once I was escorted to my car, I would be prosecuted with trespass if I was ever found on the premises again. So, when people call me, I have no other recourse than to tell them I can’t help them with work related matters. If it is for them personally, I am able to help them. Besides, I have to wonder if any of these calls are attempts to trap me in some way for what ever reason.
As a previous IT worker, this seems to be standard practice. Why would you lay off or fire someone who has this information that is needed, even two years after they got rid of you? I haven’t a clue on this one. Obviously, they didn’t like paying me or they wouldn’t have let me go. As for the constant attempts to “help out” someone there with what I know, I am not sure if this means the people currently there can do their job or not. Why else would they be asking for help. Even more amazing to me is that the equipment I worked was on the bleeding edge of technology — you know, the kind that no one has experience and there are no manuals other than code that might have been written as OpenSource in creating the products. Two years later, most of that should be fairly established products and new ones taken those equipment’s places. On the other hand, maybe not.
If you are a manager at a company who lets their IT workers go for what ever reason, respect your decision and live with the consequences of your decision. Don’t keep having people go back and harass the people who you threatened and tortured already. Continuing to do it only aggravates them, and makes any hope of repairing the relationship with them more difficult. Live with your decision and let your staff know they aren’t to contact employees that you have axed for whatever reason at a previous time. Let them live their lives in peace.
Inconsequential Reflection 