Coworker tells on himself by complaining to CEO when IT guy deletes banned and inappropriate "personal" files off his work computer: 'He went to the CEO and complained'

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Brad Dickson • Managing Editor
Mar 25, 2025 7:00 AM EDT

The idea of having your personal files on your workplace device is just a recipe for disaster. It is, after all, company property and with things like remote access and the possibility of IT needing to access your device (a request to which you won't be able to say no) it really makes sense to maintain that separation of professional and personal life—even if you don't have anything you need to hide.

The reality is that people are pretty lax about their work/life separation in New Zealand, and it's not uncommon for workers to use their work-provided phone and computer as their only phone and computer, same thing goes for email addresses, vehicles—anything really. It's the kind of thing that would horrify your average American worker and leave American Corporate HR departments chewing their fingernails to the quick. So, it's not all that uncommon to have personal files and things on your workplace devices, but, even then, there should be boundaries. 


If someone were to find something that you shouldn't have on your workplace device—something that could get you in a whole lot of trouble—you'd be a fool to turn around and out yourself. But that's what this genius coworker did after the IT guy found and quietly deleted inappropriate files off his device… It takes all types in this world, and this guy definitely isn't the sharpest of tools.

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    Cheezburger Image 10485500416
    via Getty Images For Unsplash+

    The image does not depict the actual subjects of the story. Subjects are models.

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    "Boss applies policy, employee gets mad, CEO rips employee a new one."

    Back in the early 2000s I was working for a local council in New Zealand. If you're not aware, NZ has a central govt, and a series of local areas around cities or rural boundaries, each run by an elected Mayor and Council. The day to day business is, of course, done by employees in a typical business structure.
    via Eldon42
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    One of the things about this is that all computer systems are regarded as being "owned" by the council, and kinda-sorta by the populace. It a member of the public wants to see what's on the computers, they can make a request under the Official Information Act, and see pretty much anything, except private data. (Private data being defined by the Privacy Act as basically names, addresses, birth dates, phone numbers, etc.)
    via Eldon42
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    Also working in the council offices was a small business, that had an exclusive. contract with the council. This group handled the more physical aspects of the council systems: maintenance of roads, sewer and water systems, etc. If the council said "we need a new pipe there", this small business made it happen. Thing is, the Small Business leased (this is important) their computers from the council. The small I.T. team (three people, including me) built and supplied those machines. We owned the
    via Eldon42
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    Periodically, we in I.T. would clean out large files. (Early 2000s, when storage was expensive, and we were limited due to budget, etc.) Now, the staff were fully aware of this, and knew to keep personal files to a minimum. If we, during a purge, found large personal files, we could delete them at our discretion. During this time we found some... videos... on an SB employee's machine. It was Because this violated council policy in oh-so-many ways, we deleted it quietly.
    via Eldon42
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    The employee in question complained, claiming we had removed "personal" files. (I never saw the videos, happily, but my understanding is that he wasn't. in them. They were stuff he had downloaded.) We pointed at the policy. He went to the CEO and complained. The CEO came to us. My boss had figured this might happen (the employee in question was an... interesting... guy), and showed the CEO one of the videos. Which was on the backups, just in case we deleted. something we shouldn't and had to res
    via Eldon42
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    I wasn't there when it happened, but by all accounts the CEO hauled the employee and the employee's boss. (boss of the SB) to an out-of-hearing location and ripped them a new one. The only reason the employee wasn't fired was because he technically worked for the SB, and not the council. FYI, we would regularly block sites. But, being the early 2000's, new ones popped up all the time. Unless an employee tried to access them, we probably didn't know they existed. It's not that we were prudes, it'
    via Eldon42
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    Cheezburger Image 10485501184
    via Getty Images For Unsplash+

    The image does not depict the actual subjects of the story. Subjects are models.

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    jackoneilll Late 90s, early 2000's, I had to monitor the companies shiny new internet T1 for people browsing 1. Only two people did, the president/ceo and the vp (small company, just the one). My boss just shrugged, nothing we could do about that.
    via Eldon42
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    CoderJoe1 I worked for a large corp in the US in the early 2000s. All of our laptops were loaded with a default Windows image our IT dept had made. I'm guessing one of the IT guys used his own machine for the image because the first thing I did when I received my newly imaged laptop was delete all the from the internet explorer cab files. I showed my boss and his boss. Not sure what happened, but surely somebody got chewed out.
    via Eldon42
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    Upvoter_Never Die Reminds me of my duty of having to browse for I on a US Navy aircraft carrier's network when I was part of the IT security division. The things I looked at were...diverse and varied, to say the least.
    via Eldon42
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    ChiTownBob I'm suspecting this guy was a crony of some kind. The utter entitlement mentality of this employee tells me this. Any ordinary employee would have been fired on the spot for that.
    via Eldon42

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