Mott the Hoople
Sweet Jane
I know what it's like to be in a position of "Protect the program" or do the right thing. I worked for a company for ten years that was developing a unique manufacturing process. About 8 years in the principles of the company ran low on capital and could no longer finance operations so they sold their interest to another group of investors. Things went screwy real quick. Money that should have been available for day to day production operations began running short and other odd things. Then we started getting calls from investors wanting to know if we knew when the company was going public. Some of my colleagues did some investigating and discovered that the three principles of our company were selling stocks in our company to investors in New York. The only problem is that the investors were told the money was going into upscaling our plant but we never saw any of it. We also were concerned that they weren't legally registered to sell stocks to the public. To make a long story short the six key people running this plant, of which I was one, had a meeting. Three of us, including myself wanted to call the authorities cause we believed these guys were playing a con game. The other three didn't. They wanted to protect our opration. Their first concern was that they and everyone else would lose their jobs and they wanted to protect their careers an jobs. So behind their backs myself and another colleague called the authorities and provided them the information we had and the names of some of the investors we believed had been conned. When all was said and done and hte investigations completed our plant was closed down and these three goons were arrested, eventually convicted and served time. Turned out they were mobsters in the New York Gambino family working out of Florida.
So I ended up losing my high paying job as did others but I never lost any sleep over it. Particularly after the investigation when we found out that these crooks has stolen over 3 million of investors money. Had we not acted and did the right thing they certainly would have stolen more. So I passed that test. I did the right thing knowing it could cost me my job. It also took me about 5 years to get back to where I was career wise and financially when this all happened. God rot the bastards. Having said that. There were some very good people I worked with who would have allowed this to continue so that they could keep their jobs. In my view they failed this test.
