Reply to post: I didn't need to do it. Management did it for me.

I didn't need to do it. Management did it for me.

In the early 1980s, I was on contract for a Fortune 500 company. My manager was notoriously, almost pathologically miserly. So while other teams had IBM ATs (80286 machines with 20MB hard disks) or at worst IBM XTs (8088 PCs with 10MB hard disks), our team had IBM PCs (8088 machines with no hard disk, only floppy drives), in order to save money.

Floppy disks cost about $3 each, or $25 for a box of 10. That was if you got the good ones (Dysan or Maxell), and of course, we didn't. Our manager got something like 10 boxes of BASF for $89. As you can imagine, these disks were cheaper for a reason, and data loss was very high.

Being the paranoid sort, I kept redundant backups. My source and tools grew to about 8 diskettes, so I just allocated one box to the project. One at home, and one at work, plus the original source meant I was using 3 boxes.

When my contract ended, in my exit interview, I turned over all 3 boxes. My manager very angrily said "so you're the one who's been hogging all the disks". He summoned another team member, and handed him the two boxes of backups, and ordered him to reformat them and put them in the general diskette pool, "where they should have been in the first place".

I left the company, and life went on.

A few months later, I got a call from them. The manager had gone to another office to install the component that I'd been working on. Rather than "waste" two more floppies and make copies of the executables to install, he took the entire box of disks, including the source and tools, with him. So when he slipped on the ice getting out of the streetcar, dropped the box of disks, and they were promptly run over by a car, that meant everything I'd worked on for them for over a year was lost. Source, executable, tools, documentation, everything.

Did I... by chance... happen to have any copies, even partial ones, at home?

I pointed out that would have been a violation of NDA (it would have), so no, I didn't.

Fortunately, for me, if not the company, I still had the copy of my exit interview, where the manager had put in writing the fact that I'd been "wasting" valuable floppies by "hoarding" floppy disks from the rest of the team. So if they wanted to claim that I'd been the one at fault for the loss, I had proof that I'd provided complete source when I left, and they'd accepted it.

The person one the one sounded like I wasn't the first person to tell him that, and this wasn't the first time this had happened.