entirely. everybody lost on this one.

The fact that she was checking the want ads in the first place says something about the situation.

It also depends upon the characters of people. That woman could easily take revenge on the boss she thought to be no longer loyal just because she got extremely angry at seeing the advertisement

Absolutely. In the example I gave above, the company owners were putting well over $300k/year each in their pockets from profit, as well as remaining debt-free. If anything there might be a reverse correlation with success, seems like when everything is going well people don't want to consider the potential bad things.

The job that I recently had done involved a head strike on one of two drives that are mirrored. The THEORY is that RAID should overlook that problem or error out the drive and continue. The REALITY is that it doesn't always work as planned, and in this case it freaked out and started writing bad data to both drives. The recovery entailed finding the original file traces without the benefit of the normal pointers to the files, and putting them back together, without also inserting bad data. It goes well beyond just running a recovery program. In the old days of 20/30 MB drives I have done several byte-level recoveries like this, and they were not trivial then. Now do it with a 150 GB drive.

Not really. If you work in America today, you should always be checking the want ads. There is no loyalty.

I understand this completely, having worked for a sub-contract for the military. However, as a business owner, it is up to me to make sure my investment is protected. Not only by hiring the right person, but to setup someone to check up on such persons work. This kind of thinking can apply to your finances. If you hire an investment manager, but not have someone double check his doings, you may be bilked out of thousands or even millions of dollars.
I work for a global software company, and to this day, the second in command reviews and signs every check for every purchase order.
Even if this company were old school (ie just hard copy), you have to consider "what if" scenarios. What about fire, theft, or flood? Trusting your business to the idea that disasters never happen is irresponsible. This company was lucky that there was a way to recover the hard disk. Others have not had such ability. Case in point. The state of Hawaii lost hundreds of irreplaceable, historic maps due to a hurricane causing a flood at the museum where they were housed. They kept them in the basement! They were irresponsible in A. not digitizing them, and B. not considering that a flood was possible.

Trustworthiness -- and trust
 

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I still feel that the best way to get someone to be trustworthy, is to actually trust them. It has worked for me, with clients as well as service providers. Time and again, they prove to be as good as their word – which I strive to be as well. I have rarely been burned professionally.

That does not, however, mean that you choose to trust everybody! And it certainly does not work with companies that have lost their humanity.

Just a thought...

-- ArcticStones
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For the last 30 years or so are in what I think of as the MBA era -- everything a company does any more is based on a strict what-if spreadsheet analysis and has little if anything to do with the human resources involved in the decision. Corporations have, if I may coin a phrase, become completely left-brained. HR (a complete misnomer) departments have grown up to defend corporations for their abuses and deliver the letter of the law rather than the spirit of the law. There are still some good citizens, but, of course, they aren't as rich at the bean-counting set.

It's a shame, too, because the downside of this behavior is that neither customers nor employees have any loyalty to corporations at all, having somewhat defensively gone to the what's-best-for-me position in both shopping and employment. Further, unfortunately, what's-best-for-me is all to often a strictly monetary decision (best deal, best salary) -- i.e., what's-best-for-me has become left-brained as well.

These positions on both our parts inevitably strips "service" of any kind out of the mix; Walmart employs greeters, but not a soul to help you; try to call any corporation, government agency, or retail establishment and go through the "if blah, blah, press 1, then "all our representatives are busy", then we value your business while ghastly music plays...." Call for tech support and get some guy in South India. Why do they do that? It's cheaper, and we, as part of the vicious circle, demand cheaper or we won't buy.

I could go on and on, but you get the picture.

Indeed I do. What we are getting instead is essentially a cybernetic process: the Corporation as automaton – a monster. Having assumed its own life and character, it is self perpetuating. And in such a system, only certain types of people reach key management positions.

Tragically we are sacrificing incredibly much in the process...