In this malicious compliance story, sorry, I deleted all the files you told me to delete.

My job was to design and write software prototypes for individual high-value customers.

If they liked it well enough, then a real software engineer team would build the real product.

Occasionally, I would run the prototype for a few months while the customer evaluated

if they wanted to buy the real project.

Now these prototypes are not a lot of code, but they do run with a lot of data.

Being compressed, it can be a terabyte or more.

Having done this for years, I've accumulated a small disk form of past projects, which

can be very useful when a customer asks for something just like we did last year, but

with a small change or two.

The company resisted buying hard drives for this, but it saves me so much time.

I ended up buying one or two a year myself until I accumulated about ten of these, figure

over a $1,000 worth of external drives.

And unexpectedly, management changes, new management things they can replace old software

guy with a cheaper new software grad, and I am laid off.

With two weeks to train my replacement, yes, it's blatant age discrimination, but impossible

to fight, so I just went for a graceful transition to my next job, except that I have $1,000

of personal disk drives with old customer data on them.

The company insists that no employees may take any company data off the premises and

all files must be deleted.

I don't want to just leave the drives of the company, but they insist I must delete

all data before taking them home, so I offer option one, they can buy them from me, or

...