Time stood still in Swansea as the official clock-watcher protested at his job being axed after 30 years.
Horologist David Mitchell, retiring at 72, turned the hands on eight landmark timepieces to 12 o’clock as he finished his last day winding up their manual workings.
He says it had to be done for safety reasons – but is nevertheless ticked off that he’s not being replaced. The council says it will eventually rely on electric winding.
But David’s not the first employee to get wound up by his ex-bosses. And his gesture of protest was mild compared to the kind of revenge that some wreaked...
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When an argument about pay at a McDonald’s restaurant in Minnesota blew up out of all proportion, it went badly for all involved.
Teenage employee Lonnie Johnson went ballistic on hearing he’d been fired, and started to smash up the joint – which was all caught on cameraphone.
Footage of him shouting, swearing, throwing drinks and smashing glasses went viral with more than three million online hits last month.
That cost branch manager Brandon Robertson his job too – for losing control of the situation.
Go hack to jail
When Black Dog Studios in Folsom, California, fired a web developer, he tried to get his revenge by asking a friend to hack into the firm’s systems and delete data.
This backfired when the hacking attempt was quickly discovered and traced straight back to him.
Even worse, because the company was involved in apps involving confidential school student information, the FBI got involved and both he and his hacker pal found themselves jailed for 90 days and fined £3,000.
Powerporn presentation
Giving a presentation to city officials, Greg Warren, the chief executive of Baltimore Substance Abuse Systems, was left embarrassed when a picture of a naked woman popped up on his 64in screen.
Angry former IT support manager Walter Powell had hacked the PowerPoint presentation to make it show porn, as well as causing cyber mischief elsewhere.
The attack in 2011 cost the firm £50,000, and 52-year-old Powell was punished with a two-year suspended prison sentence and 100 hours of community service.
Premature escalation
Believing she was about to be fired from Steven E Hutchins Architects, an employee went to her office on Sunday night and deleted seven years of drawings worth more than £1million. Marie Lupe Cooley had seen a “help wanted” advert at the Florida firm where she worked describing a job she thought was suspiciously similar to hers.
A spokesman for the sheriff in Jacksonville, Florida, said: “She decided to be spiteful and go in and sabotage the records. And she did a very good job of that.”
Cooley was caught and sent to jail in 2008 – and it turned out that her job had never been in danger after all.
The Golden Gateway
Hearing he was about to get the boot, municipal computer engineer Terry Childs decided to make himself indispensable. He changed computer systems administering the whole of the city of San Francisco – everything from police records to the mayor’s email account – so only he could access them.
Instead of being fired he was thrown in jail, but he still refused to give up the passwords, even when his bail was set at $5million to stop him getting to a computer and deleting everything.
After 12 days behind bars and with the city on the brink of disaster, Childs eventually agreed to hand over the passwords, but only to the mayor in person.
In 2010 he was sentenced to four years in prison and fined £1million for holding the city to ransom.
Going nowhere fast
Revenge was a dish best served noisily and from a distance, for 20-year-old Omar Ramos-Lopez.
Fired from a car dealership n Austin, Texas, he got back into the company’s computer system using a colleague’s password and caused havoc using a security immobilisation system connected to the vehicles they’d sold.
First he made hundreds of car horns go off in the middle of the night, then he simply disabled the cars so they couldn’t move, leaving customers unable to get to work or school.
“Omar was pretty good with computers,” admitted manager Martin Garcia.
A dish served cold
Fuming chef Jim Knight, 28, hijacked his pub’s Twitter profile to rant at bosses who sacked him after he asked for Christmas Day off.
He sent rogue messages from the official account of The Plough in Oxfordshire, slating the decision to axe him.
Jim told its 2,500 followers: “We’d like to inform you that we’ve just fired our head chef.
“Unfortunately he wanted to have a weekend off this month and Christmas Day this year for family commitments so we thought we’d sack him.
“Yeah, a week before Christmas! We don’t care that he has a 7½-month-old baby daughter.”
Dirty Tricks
When a colleague was fired at Dirty Dick’s bar in Edinburgh in December a sympathetic barman took revenge on her behalf by giving customers free drinks and huge measures.
The Aussie bartender, who claimed his pal had been sacked for eating a salad during a 10-hour shift, not only didn’t charge drinkers, he put up a chalk sign urging them to write bad reviews about the place on TripAdvisor.
Duck-bill quacky fuss
After builder Chiu Xiang couldn’t get client Hung Bin to pay £300 for work he’d done he got his revenge in a bizarre way – by ordering 1,130 live ducklings to be sent to the other man’s home.
“It was all he deserved,” the 60-year-old tradesman from China’s Sichuan province was quoted as saying. “I hope the ducks drove him quackers.” (Or perhaps a similar pun in his own language).
Bizarrely, the ploy worked.The pair finally agreed a settlement over the disputed, er, bill.
