Visiting an old workplace is a weird experience. Seeing old friends and coworkers still bound by the same toxic policies and stresses that once held you stirs rippling memories like a stone skipping across a pond's still surface before coming to rest in waters that were better left undisturbed.
While you attempt to make small talk and reconnect, you can't help but detect feelings of resentment from the old comrades you left behind; while once you suffered together, now you're free from this particular brand of torment. Their body language is rigid—as if on high alert—like a wildebeest at a watering hole, both trying to give time to you and drinking in the conversation while simultaneously on a constant lookout for predators: some manager or owner who is sure to materialize and reprimand them for wasting valuable shift time speaking with an outsider.
If the relationship is left on good terms, there are certain experiences and institutional knowledge that a departing worker might be more than willing to share with their old friends, probably more in an effort to make their lives easier than to help the organization, though the organization undoubtedly benefits from the relationship.
This is how it was when this front desk worker (turned coincidental IT guy) when he visited his old job and lent a helping hand with the workplace's cobbled-together IT system, which he had created and managed during his tenure. The system hadn't been updated or backed up since his departure, and he was concerned that it might fail and leave his old workplace stranded.
After spying him on the cameras, his old boss called to tell him that he was banned and not to return again—which would set up a chain of events that would see his old boss out of a job.
See the worker's account of events below and reactions from the original thread where it was shared on Reddit.
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