Inheriting A Trainwreck: The Few Remaining Employees Of This Gutted Digital Media Outlet Are Holding A Seance To Contact A Recently Deceased Coworker Who Has Sole Admin Privileges For Their Company’s Facebook Page
With every round of layoffs that hits the digital media industry, workers who avoid the ax are left to pick up the pieces, with fewer resources and less institutional knowledge to aid in the transition each time. This latest example of the phenomenon is absolutely heartbreaking: The few remaining employees of this gutted website are holding a seance to contact a deceased coworker who has sole admin privileges for their company’s Facebook page.
Yikes, this is bleak. Sorting out the post-cuts wreckage is looking like a full-time job in itself.
The handful of employees who survived their digital media employer’s mass layoffs in January are currently joining hands around a candlelit Ouija board, attempting to contact their late worker, Tom Pollardi—a 34-year-old social media coordinator who died in a car accident this week, tragically taking admin privileges for his company’s Facebook page to the grave with him. The remaining staff has barely had time to grieve Tom or establish a new org. chart, but seeing as no one has a clue where they’d even begin looking for the site’s Facebook password—and any former colleague who might have had it was permanently locked out of their company email within minutes of being laid off—a seance is sadly their best shot at recovering access to their Facebook page, which is by far their most relied-on platform for driving website traffic.
“Tom, if you can hear us…what is the log-in info for Meta Business Suite?” asked one of Tom’s former coworkers in a hushed tone, just before a candle began to flicker and the Oujia’s planchette slowly moved to spell out “tom@condenast.com” and “password: vyGrotfAmZqFdChb94”. “Okay, Tom, are you still with us? We’ve tried that, and Facebook says it does not recognize that username. Are you sure that’s the most up-to-date login information? Is there any chance it’s linked to your personal email, Tom? Tom? Are you there, Tom?”
What a mess. With digital media in the shape it’s in, this type of issue is probably all too common across the industry.
Honestly, the workers who got laid off are the lucky ones here, because the odds of things getting better at a company in this state are slim to none. Even if this staff manages to get the right login data out of Tom’s ghost, they’ll be completely out of luck if he set up two-step verification and connected it to his now-deactivated cell phone number before he died. Keeping the ship afloat was already going to be an uphill battle…and now this headache? Just terrible.