True story. I know a company that did a major layoff in by showing office space. As the movie progressed, HR walked around and tapped people on the shoulder. If you were still there for the end of the movie, you were still there...
Started on a 3 month contract to cover someone on maternity leave. After 3 months nothing was said, after 6 months the woman on leave came back and nothing was said, after 12 months still nothing. Eventually after 18 months they told me they would not be renewing my non-existent 12 month contract.
I spent 12 months as "the glitch" myself. It was my first office job, in data entry, at a business office for Verizon. Me and two other people were hired as temps for a project that was just supposed to last three months.
Those three months pass, and my supervisor didn't hear anything about letting us go, and wanted to keep us as long as possible, so he just had us keep filling out our timesheets. 12 months after our job was supposed to have ended, someone finally realized it and he let us know he had to end our contract.
It was also a wake-up call that people that work in these offices can really struggle with working with proprietary enterprise systems. I was practically a star in the office because I could work around all the various bugs that some enterprise Java application had so we could order all the things we needed to for other business units (I had to do some seriously janky stuff to get it to work, like close and reopen windows at certain points to keep it from crashing, choose unintuitive options, interpret what weird and unexplained acronyms mean, etc).
Holy cow that is one of the single saddest things that I have ever heard. I've known some cowardly heartless bastards in my career but no one that low.
There is a local tech company here that used to have a yearly event where they'd invite the entire tech community in for beer, popcorn and a screening of either Office Space or a bunch of episodes of the IT Crowd.
