Hypothetical Reply
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Shot Down and Fired

Anonymous

Two years ago I was working in a moderately small contract testing company that was unusual in two ways.

1) We were well paid and worked decent hours. During crunch time they would hire temps to help pick up the slack, even hiring those on full time if there was an opening.

2) A little under half the people that worked there were female. As that was my first and last job as a tester, I’m just assuming that’s not usually the case.

The company itself was only three years old and mostly worked on mobile apps, phone games, or the occasional indie title. In a fit of supposed benevolence, a big AAA studio decided to hire us for testing a companion iphone game to their much larger title. Of course, this gift from on high came with with strings attached. One particular string was loud, arrogant, and acted like the Sheriff of Nottingham visiting a village under Prince John’s rule.

This incompetent braying twit’s official job was to make sure we weren’t releasing details about the game (which contained quite a number of spoilers for their mainstay title). To him, this meant being in the same room and drinking all the soda out of our mini-fridge. On day four under his “watchful eye”, it got a lot worse for a little under half the people in our office. He started using any excuse to get physically close to the female testers, the most popular being “I need to make sure you’re not streaming this to anyone else”.

Cut to two weeks later and harassment complaints have started to pile up, but he’s still there. After making a phone call to someone our CEO knew from college and worked at the big company, we find out that he’d actually been given this job because he’d been doing the same thing at the home office and they were afraid of getting sued. With him being one of the exec’s sons, there wasn’t a whole lot we could do.

So, with the legendary stoicism of Clint Eastwood, the ladies in our office put up with it. Apparently, this upset out resident molestor, as he just got worse. Everything came to a head when he offered our resident programmer a job in exchange for “favors”. Now with the legendary steely eyed fury of Clint Eastwood, she went off on him, mostly yelling curse words and comments on the size of his waist and area right below the waist. When she was done, he left the room and immediately tried to get our boss to fire her. When he refused, we never saw him again.

Instead, the next morning we found nearly all of equipment gone, including the specially issued phones we were given to test the game. All that remained of our foray into adjacent AAA testing was an email stating that sharing facets about the game was illegal and a serious breach of contract, which translated into losing 90% of the money we were promised for testing this game.

The lesson here is simple. Always question why a rep is working with you instead of with their own company.