College sends employee to mandatory retraining months before his retirement, falsely claiming he failed a phishing test he never took

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  Older man working on a laptop at a home desk, leaning on his hand in a focused posture.

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• Mandatory retraining for non-existent "mistake"...but I'm retiring!

  
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• The phishing training industrial complex is a real and thriving corner of corporate and academic life, where automated systems send out fake suspicious emails, log who clicks them, and then dispatch remedial coursework to the offenders like a hall monitor with a subscription service. It is genuinely useful when it works correctly. When it flags someone who clicked nothing and then refuses to produce any evidence to the contrary, it stops being a security measure and starts being a bureaucratic ouroboros that exists mainly to justify its own continued operation.

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  Older man reading a document while working on a laptop in a softly lit home setting.

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• What makes this specific situation so perfectly absurd is the retirement timeline. A person with over a decade of combined teaching experience, keeping a part-time administrative role out of genuine affection for the work, gets told they failed a test they did not take and must complete remedial training immediately. The deadline passes. Nothing happens. Then a fresh demand arrives, and the email containing the demand has a link in it that the recipient is supposed to click to access the anti-phishing course. The comedic timing here required no embellishment from anyone.

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  Older man wearing glasses reading a document while using a laptop at home.

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• Going back through months of emails to document the absence of any suspicious link, and then presenting that research to IT with the analogy of being sent to Driver's Ed for a traffic violation that never happened, is the kind of response that only comes from someone who is completely right and knows it. The easy path was to take the course, check the box, and move on. But there is something deeply reasonable about refusing to accept a penalty for something that did not occur, especially when you are few months away from walking out the door anyway.

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  Older man working on a laptop at a wooden desk by a window in a shared workspace.

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• The IT Director's apology and promise to investigate is a satisfying resolution, but the real ending is that the anti-phishing email sent to correct a phishing accusation contained a link. Nobody in that department noticed. The irony apparently passed all the security checks.

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