Before you launch an offense against the company that just destroyed your life, get on the defensive first. If you had been with the company for a long time, part of your history is in that company laptop or company phone. BACK UP!
My retrenchment was extremely devious. Management from US only made the call to us at 10 am our time, which is roughly 1 am over there. Now, we all know nobody in senior management will be staying up that late unless it’s for karaoke, drinks or some other business activity. It’s calculated to have us all in the office so that they can immediately get one of their henchmen to confiscate your laptop and phone and escort you out of premise.
Is this legal? Many people ask.
Well, legally, the laptop or phone (if its not personal) belongs to the company, so they can do whatever they want to it. Many companies fear sabotage from disgruntled employees and a quick way is to have them in the premise and grab a hold of the company assets and remove their access immediately.
Is it legal for them to be so devious about it? It depends on what the country law is, which we will go through it later.
For me, since I was working till the morning the previous night and had a teleconference, I wasn’t in the office when the axe dropped. Which was good.
1) Let your customers know. Many might not agree to this but there’s good reasons why customers must know you are retrenched, especially if you’re in sales, or senior positions. One, it’s ethical. Else, they will continue to send you email and tell you about company related information, which you should no longer be privy to. Two, for sales managers, you need to network with your customers. If it’s a sudden death, like what we faced, many customers/partners will go berserk because they are left in a lurch. That’s NOT YOUR PROBLEM. That’s the problem of the company that just fired you. Keep all customers and partners contact because any industry is small. You’re bound to bump into them sooner or later. I know of a channel sales who sent out 300 emails and smses announcing his retrenchment and stirred up a hornet’s nest from Australia to Japan. Remember: NOT YOUR PROBLEM.
2) Backup your SMS and addressbook. Each phone these days comes with some kind of software kit for your PC. Hook it up and send everything to a personal PC or external harddrive.
3) Backup your emails. Emails can be generally found in C:\Documents and Settings\your.name\Outlook stored in .pst files. Just backup the whole Docs & Settings folder and sort it out later.
4) Backup your personal stuff. Now all of us have a few things in our laptops that aren’t supposed to be there, i.e anything personal, including documents, pictures, videos, games, and god forbid any illegal applications! Either remove them or back up, just don’t leave your stuff for other fellas to clean up. Hasn’t Edison Chen taught you anything???
5) Clean out the browsers! Many people forget to do this, but your browser stores cookies, temporary files, bookmarks and worst, passwords for sites. This is the most vital thing you need to do, is to remove all saved passwords and form information and temporary files, including those in default download folder. If you have multiple browsers, you need to sterilise them all.
6) Clean out applications. Some apps might contain more passwords/information like FTP clients, VPN clients etc that people can poke around. What I like to do is simply go to add/remove programs, seek out all the programs that have been installed by myself and remove them.
7) Clean out your registry. The registry is like your yellow pages in your computer. Every app registers itself there once installed, so when you remove it, sometimes, these registry data is left behind. You can use a free registry cleaner like Eusing Registry Cleaner to remove invalid entries.
8 ) Finally, shred your drive. No, not physically, but if that’s an option, you should! Shredding means completely deleting your files. See, when you delete and remove files from your thrash box icon, Windows doesn’t really ‘delete’ it. It just removes the pointer to the data and allows that ‘space’ to be overwritten by other data. The ‘deleted’ data still exist! You can download a freetool called Restoration, a very small tool that will recover all deleted files.
To shred a drive, you need to overwrite over and over again. There are lots of tools out there that does this, just google ‘Hard Drive Delete’. Most offer military algorithms to delete your drive but you need to pay for it, but your information is probably not extremely classified, so some free tools you want to try out:
If anyone interested I can probably write up a more comprehensive review on the best and quickest way to shred your files.
Problem
Of course, I realise that time is probably not on your side, and the laptop is probably required then and there. It depends on you and your company. For me, I had good friendships with the procurement and admin staff in the country and negotiated for an additional day due to ‘extracting large videos of my wedding’. Most people are not sadistic enough to reject that request.
If your admin staff are sadists, then you can only hope to constantly backup weekly to external drive (You want a big one! I personally have a 1.5 Terabyte external harddrive). and maybe every month, run the file wiping tool to remove any remnants of references to deleted files.
Good luck!
