I can’t believe that I haven’t seen this mentioned yet, but go to HR immediately. Certainly the ignorant stuff that Paul is doing is worth mentioning, though I generally shy away from ratting someone out for just being an asshole, but as it applies to your work and the possible sabotage you need to have another person outside of your direct line of authority involved.
Telling your boss that you think someone is screwing with you only helps if your boss isn’t somehow involved with it. Hell, even if he just dismisses it you’re in trouble. You need to explain the situation to HR and show them the tracks behind these moved files to protect yourself. Work to get the previous write-ups rescinded and see that HR leads the effort to get IT working to investigate. Do not go directly to them because it’s possible that they could destroy evidence accidentally, especially if they are under the impression that they are just supposed to fix the glitch, and it’s equally as likely that they’ll dismiss it as a non-technical problem because it might cover their own ass for some mistake. The one username issue is a potential lawsuit and/or reprimand on it’s own, so one might think that IT has it’s own issues which it doesn’t want light shined upon by upper management.
So, in short, cover your ass. Don’t trust anyone and get a paper trail going both personally and officially. Even if this becomes the final straw towards you taking a new job, you should not let this lie because it can follow you later in your career. If this makes it appear that you cost the company money that could come back at you and at the very least you want to have good references.
HR is usually pure evil and they don’t earn their worth, but situations like these are where they are supposed to be interested in protecting you and in turn protecting the company.
Fuck that! The solution here is absolutely not to lay low. I think it’s reasonable to not want to tackle both the Paul situation and the possible sabotage situation at once, it could make it appear that you are trying to scapegoat him or smokescreen your issues. You should however confront the accusations of incompetence aggressively and officially. Once they have isolated the problem, or at least created a situation where no one can tamper with your work (different logins!) then you can address the Paul situation. Perhaps he would be found to be responsible for screwing with your work and kill two birds with one stone anyways. But I can’t say this emphatically enough, defend your reputation and your job if you are confident that you were not at fault. As it stands it sounds like you have plenty of evidence to show that you did indeed do the work and it should warrant a real inquiry into the issue from people other than just your boss. It illustrates a lack of control on his part at the very least.
I’m just here to offer consolation. That is horrible and completely unjust. Your story sounds like a script for a law school class on sexual harassment. Its the kind of thing that makes me think “Damn that guy needs his ass kicked”. I know that’s a horribly primitive reaction. Then again it sounds “Paul” operates on just his brain stem anyway.
I’m in insurance too. There are plenty of jobs in this industry. That your employer would tolerate such openly disrespectful behavior is troubling. I say start looking for something in a more established agency or brokerage. NY is chock full of insurance companies, brokers and agents.
I agree with most of what you posted except this one point - HR is ONLY interested in protecting the company. When an employee also gets protected by HR policies, that is coincidental. In this case, HR would work to protect the company from the sexual harassment lawsuit that pbbth could bring against Paul, and that might involve helping pbbth with him.
We have no HR department. We have less than 40 people here in the office…in fact I think we might have less than 35 people so I don’t think they have decided that we need HR quite yet.
The appraisal situation is being looked into but they will not give us more than 1 login. Apparently that isn’t cost effective. :rolleyes: The CEO is looking into the appraisals as well so I am simply waiting until I hear back from the higher-ups about it before I start attempting to address the other issues.
One thing you might want to keep in mind is you’re probably not the only person who’s bothered by this guy’s actions. Even some of the men may not be comfortable with it. If he’s the office golden boy with record sales though, or if no one else is speaking up about it, others may not be the one to say something and get themselves in trouble.
I’m also concerned about this business of having one password for all users. You said it isn’t cost effective to have more than one. This raised a red flag with me. If you only have one password because the software is only licensed for one user and more than one person is using it, the company which sells the software may get rather upset when they find out about this. They may get upset to the point where they take legal action. I don’t know how often software vendors go after customers who do this sort of thing and I don’t know what the legal ramifications are, but it might be worth pointing out to the powers that be.
It sounds weird to me also…unless they have had some seriously good IT person from day one, young startups are always improperly sharing licenses and installations, or using pirated or unregistered software. It is very common for software vendors, especially Microsoft and Adobe, to come crashing down hard with audits on companies like this. Big fines, penalties, settlements, yadda yadda.
It could be used possibly as leverage to fix your IT security holes if you can show how non-compliant they are, but it would be very tough to spin it in a way that doesn’t sound like you are threatening to rat your company out.
I thought this might end up being the case, while you have no HR department there certainly is someone tasked with those duties. You have healthcare, benefits, vacation and sick time and ultimately someone who is responsible for hiring and firing. You’ll have to at the very least bring the issue to them. That the CEO is involved is probably a good thing since he’s the one who’d ultimately be responsible for anything negative within the company. With luck he’ll isolate the issue and locate the problem. I would argue that its a 98% likelihood that the one-login situation is at it’s root, and with luck it will get them off that decision when they see that the cost of the proper licenses outweigh the potential risks.