People can get awfully paranoid when it comes to their jobs. Some people can't help but think that everyone is out to get them, which seems to be the case for Marie Cooley of Jacksonville, Florida.
Cooley is currently in jail after confessing to deleting files worth an estimated $2.5 million at her former employer, all because she
thought she was about to get fired. As it turns out, she wasn't getting the boot, but we're not entirely sure she's the one with the most questionable judgment in this story.
It turns out that Cooley saw an ad in the classifieds for a job that sounded a lot like hers posted by her current employer, Steven E. Hutchins Architects, also in Jacksonville. She got angry, went in to work, and deleted all the company's work from its servers. She cleaned out seven years' worth of designs and drawings, designs the owner of the company estimated were worth $2.5 million. Cooley confessed to what is a second degree felony, potentially punishable by a five-year sentence.
She obviously wasn't quite right in the head when doing this, but we're inclined to think that the owner of the business isn't
all there either. Despite estimating the worth of the company's files at $2.5 million, the architecture firm had no backup systems in place. That's a recipe for disaster regardless of the sanity of your employees. Even the local Sheriff's office knows better than that, issuing the following statement:
The lesson to be learned here is that you can't depend on having just one set of records or files and having your employees have access to them. You've got to have some kind of backup.
Thankfully the files were able to be recovered, but backups of important files are not something you should take lightly. These days, backups are easy to implement, regardless of what kind of computing you do. On the Mac,
OSX 10.5 Leopard includes the Time Machine functionality which, when stored on an external USB drive, makes backing up easy. On Windows you can copy your important stuff to an external drive yourself or invest in a
Windows Home Server box to automatically and securely back up your stuff daily.
Oh, and that job posting that sent Cooley off? Turns out it was for another company run by the boss's wife. Go figure.
From
First Coast NewsRelated Links:
