Pr3++yG33kyTh1ng

Today I'm going to write about what happens when someone stops working here. Well, technically I've stopped working here, but I mean when the "employment relationship" ends.
When someone is blamed for something bad enough to get them fired or finds a better job or just snaps and quits in a flurry of thrown badges and formatted hard drives, our Human Resources department flies into action.
Like the grim angel of unemployment, she (much like the technical side for so long, HR is a team of one) moves a Manila folder from one area to another and sends out four emails.
These emails announce that network access, email and mailing list membership be revoked and that the mailbox for that user be opened up to his or her manager. There are other emails about equipment returns and HR lawsuit-type stuff but I don't care.
At the same time as the four emails, four traceable work orders are created and assigned and a service desk ticket is also generated to track these work orders.
So I got an email yesterday from HR about some old tickets and work orders. The email requested a status update on all of them.
Now, our ticket tracking software is truly an intuitive marvel. Tickets fall into categories and can be tracked by problem type, ticket creator, client name. You can decide that you want to see every open ticket related to Windows and refresh this view every five minutes to keep up with new developments. Or you can narrow the parameters like me, so that only tickets assigned directly to me are ever seen.
I replied politely to the dark angel of unemployment that I would investigate these tickets, since searching by ticket number also allows me to not waste my time looking at work assigned to anyone else.
A few were pretty routine temination notices, a few that I had completed after getting the email. I just never bothered to find the ticket and close it.
Then I got to the last one. One Service Desk ticket and six work orders to kill access, archive the mailbox, change rights to view personal folders and research various on-going projects. Remote access was to be turned off, an image of the laptop archived and every internal mailing list had to be modified, since the departing employee was a domain level administrator with rights to every system and knowledge of every password. Wow. Why did I miss that?
Because the terminated employee was the old Microsoft guy, and all the termination tickets for his own account had been assigned directly to him. After he left.

Plans for today include just manning the fort, mostly. We have several people out on vacation and last night a few people worked late and won't be in until much later today.
Additionally, these people worked late because our monitoring solution broke last night for several hours. As a result, buffered error messages from systems that went unmonitored continue to stream in. Right now there is no telling what is legitimately broken.
Go Team Ineffective!