Lost job to new job
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, the company I worked for let go a lot of people. I lost my job and switched to freelancing. I was lucky enough to land a position working as a video editor doing social media content for a large company, think multinational.
I was desperate for money at the time, and was getting paid barely anything in a toxic environment with an insane workload. The office was a bitter and snide place. Management deliberately set freelancers against each other across different countries in shared Slack and Teams channels, making people compete for jobs.
I was spared most of it because I was remote, but I still saw the verbal fights, harassment and threats in Slack and Teams on a daily basis. I think management just liked watching people fight. One of the managers who ran those channels ended up being the same person who fielded the escalation emails.
years later, when the access got cut.
Asking for what I am worth
After six months, I had enough proof to show that my work was having a very positive effect on their social media presence. Better views, better engagement, reactions, shares, and even conversion to sales could be traced back to videos I had edited.
I asked for a conversion to contract, with salary and benefits. I quoted the market rate because I wasn’t trying to squeeze them. I just wanted a fair contract and salary. Even though I was making slightly more as a freelancer, a contract would give me stability and ease some of my financial anxieties.
Their reply was immediate termination, claiming I was not “pulling my weight” and not having the desired effect on social media performance. I think now they just didn’t want to pay me what I was worth. Easier to call it underperformance and terminate than actually negotiate. As angry as I was, there was nothing I could do against a company that didn’t even have a local Malaysian office.
Regardless, I moved on.
A rediscovery
In 2024, I was doing a digital cleanup to free up storage space instead of paying for more, and rediscovered an old Google Drive account from that period. I noticed something unexpected. The folders, templates, and even filters and overlays I had built were still actively being used.
Checking the manage access panel, I saw over twenty different email accounts were still accessing those folders, and the activity log showed files had been opened as recently as a few days before.
Pulling the plug
I downloaded a local copy of the templates, filters, effects, overlays, and other assets I had created, which were still sitting in that Drive. Then I removed all shared access and locked down the files by changing permissions and ownership settings, since the entire structure was still tied to my personal account.
I did not expect that level of dependency on a single external account, especially not for what was really just their editing toolkit, not their whole campaign system. I watched as access requests started trickling in, then increasing. The folder still showed my email as the owner, so people knew exactly where to reach.
Their fallout
Messages followed. Not begging, but urgent requests, escalations, and eventually formal internal escalation emails asking for access restoration. It quickly became clear to me and them that they had lost access to key parts of their content production workflow.
Whether anyone was held responsible or even fired, I don’t know.
What is clear is that they had been running their editing pipeline on infrastructure that was still sitting in a freelancer’s personal drive account long after the working relationship ended. I couldn’t believe that nobody had checked on this for three years.
There was a certain satisfaction in that. Revenge long overdue.
Couldn’t have happened to a nicer company.
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Read also: ‘I gave up my family to pursue my dreams’ Shares 34 YO M’sian woman – In Real Life
https://inreallife.my/i-gave-up-my-family-to-pursue-my-dreams-shares-34-yo-msian-woman/
‘I gave up my family to pursue my dreams’ Shares 34 YO M’sian woman
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