I had a very slow decline over a couple years. Basically a senior VP got a married male coworker drunk at lunch and then they “stopped by VP’s condo real quick” where my coworker was SA’d.
The coworker tells everyone, HR gets involved, coworker gets a huge promotion reporting directly to the VP, and suddenly coworker “think it may have happened differently” when I asked him what in the gd fuck he was doing.
Over 2 years my team of 8 + director bailed. I stayed thinking I’d outlast the shitty leadership and be a shoe-in for the vacant director position. Instead I got put on another team where I trained a handful of actually nice people on how to work with a data warehouse but leadership was still soured on me. What broke me finally was when my new director gave a promotion related to the job I’d been teaching everyone to another person. Also after hours one day while I was teaching a different coworker how to code and my new director came by to ask if it was done. I told him it wasn’t but it would be as I was letting this person take the reigns while I watched. My director told me “just quit bitching and get this shit done.”
At our standup the next morning I resigned in front of him and the entire team. The calls I got for MONTHS after that still help me fall asleep some nights. I’m talking about being asked to debug entire log files and providing admin credentials for the database that I “couldn’t remember exactly” but they were “stored somewhere on [a cluster of 16 different servers”.
So I took a lateral move to another agency where I had the same pay but since then have more doubled my salary and been promoted 3 times in 7 years.
What I learned was actually from something my douchebag director told me: “you can’t make people act how you want to” which was a dig at me but I’ve thought about it a lot. I wanted my agency to see the wrongs, see the people fleeing, have my coworker be honest about the SA that he almost resigned over, and I wanted to be vindicated. But that’s just not what happened.
If you’re in a toxic place where someone like my old VP has the ear of leadership and turns them against you, just bail. I knew my time was coming when I’d turn the corner on a city block and see my building and I’d feel my heart race. It’s always good to fight the good fight and we all need to but you’ve also gotta realize when it’s best to walk away and do what’s solely best for you, not some higher broader moral principle.
It also taught me a lot about workplace politics. I shouldn’t have been so open about about my displeasure and the betrayal of the coworker getting everyone involved and then doing a 180 when he got a promotion to be quiet. I’ve learned to keep the smile on my face and be more covert; otherwise the people you don’t like see it coming.
A funny part is that within a couple years of me resigning my old agency fired all the top brass - president, CIO, top VP and the VP who SA’d the coworker and that coworker also resigned. I think something blew up or happened again and it wiped that place out. It’s also seen a 70% turnover in the time I’ve been gone with 50% of that being within a few years of me leaving. It’s also never quite recovered and they’ve had to bring in “morale experts” because people breakdown and are seen crying in the hallways.
When the KY Governor went Dem the KY Cons tried to strip his ability to appoint vacant Congress seats. This was overturned in court.
However they did add a rule that the Governor could not replace someone within 95 days of an election.
95 days before 11/3/2026, the midterms, is 7/31/2026. I imagine they will use the “he’s recovering” line until 8/1/2026 so the Cons have tighter control over congress. Or at the very least, they are trying to chew up as much time as possible before he gets replaced.