It’s the late 90s and I was working in IT for a small (200 employees) company.
One of my tasks was performing daily data backups, which ran for about four hours and started after everyone else had left for the day.
We had an intercom system in the building, where if you picked up your phone and dialed a specific extension, you could page someone, or make announcements so everyone could hear.
One night I was in the process of running Ethernet cable from switches on the second floor down to individual terminals on the first floor, so there was a lot walking around the building.
I like to have music when I’m working, but I didn’t have an MP3 player at the time, so I thought… “I have music on my PC and no one is around. Why don’t I just…”, and I went around and cranked the volume knob on every ceiling intercom speaker in the whole building. Then I dialed into the intercom from the phone in my office, put the handset up as close as I could to my PC speakers, and boom, music throughout the building.
Cut to a few hours later, it’s late, I’m tired, the backup is finished, so I close down the system, hit the lights, lock the doors, and go home.
The next day, I come in, not thinking about anything from the night before, and get to work. About 11:00am, the owner’s secretary got on the intercom to page someone… and blew everyone out of their seats. There was an almost collective, “What the fuck!!!” from everyone, and an “Ohhh, shiiit” from me, because of course I immediately knew what happened.
I ran around like a madman, turning the volume down on all of the speakers that I had forgotten the night before, while saying, “No idea… Yeah it’s crazy… No no, it’s fixed now…”
No one ever found out exactly why the volume was so loud that morning.
Years ago I was working as a pharmacist in a very busy pharmacy in a city center. This was during the opioid epidemic in America and being a high volume store, had a lot of regulatory oversight on our controlled substance dispensing.
One Friday evening a young kid came in with a prescription that he said was for his grandmother. It was for a lot of oxycodone from a city two hours away. He had two girls with him when he dropped off the prescription and had never filled with us before, and wanted to pay cash. We had a policy that we didn’t fill prescriptions for maintenance controlled substances for new patients >100mi from our address. We only got so much of each controlled substance so we adopted the policy so we’d have enough for our regular patients. I told him we couldn’t fill it. He started to get angry and mouth off but left.
Cut to Monday which was my next shift and there is a folder with the DEA logo on the front of it in front of my terminal. I ask what it is to someone who worked the weekend and they said an agent dropped it off. I open it and the only thing inside is a business card slotted into those slits you sometimes see on the face of one of the pockets. I call the number and after some introductions the agent asks me if I was the one who denied the prescription on Friday. I confirm and the guys says that it was part of a multi-jurisdiction sting operation to catch a mid-level dealer who was buying scripts from people. He told me I wasted a bunch of their time and next time to just fill it. I told him it’s emphatically my job to not do that and that I didn’t appreciate him using my store since we had a bunch of other issues that local police weren’t dealing without him adding to it but he just hung up. Whatever.
My heart dropped when I saw that folder though and I’m sure that is what he wanted when he did it.
He asked you why you didn’t help someone else commit a crime and you just let that shit go?
You should have been up his supervisor’s ass, with a reporter on your left and a lawyer on your right.
Not saying anything is why these fucking Nazi pigs get to keep being Nazi pigs.
I get the sentiment, but it’s not that simple. The kid picking up someone else’s script isn’t a crime. Me denying or filling the script is a professional discretion. Also the company I was working at would not have supported me.