This past Tuesday, the Florida Times-Union (the same paper that broke the Colin Bruley story) had a piece about a paranoid worker who lost her cool and got a tad vengeful — unnecessarily.

Marie Lupe Cooley was an admin assistant at a small architect firm in Jacksonville (emphasis on ‘was’).  I won’t repeat all the details because you can read them here, but the nitty gritty is that she thought she was being replaced.  There was an ad in the paper last Friday with her job description and her boss’s email address.

Apparently she even called the boss’s wife about it - on Saturday - who tried to convince Cooley she was NOT being replaced, but Cooley didn’t believe it.  Late Sunday she went into work and wiped the computer hard drives clean. Seven years of data. Gone.

Oops!

Turns out the help wanted ad was for the boss’s wife’s company.  And it turns out that wiping your company’s computers clean will likely cause problems that cost more than $1,000 to fix, and that, my friends, would make you a felon. Which is why Ms. Cooley went to the cooler.

My question: Why was Cooley looking at the help wanted ads to begin with?

If she was doing that — and she had the gumption to call the boss’s wife about it — and she didn’t believe what she was told — maybe she shouldn’t have been working there to begin with. 

– Looking in the help wanted ads
– Not believing what you’re told

Me thinks she was ready for another job already.  If she was so convinced they were going to can her, I would have recommended she beat them to the punch: Quit! She was already in the help wanted section - she could have found another job. If she wanted revenge, she could get a job working for the competition. 

Plotting evil only begets more evil. Besides, revenge may be momentarily sweet, but the bitter aftertaste lasts forever.

And this will haunt Cooley’s career forever.

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Filed in Work, Workplace, Corporate Culture, Job Seeking