Post a Comment On: Stephanie Cake

This morning I came to work to find an email from a co-worker... Subject line was "Things that make you go hmmmm..." General gist of the message was "thought you might want to take a look at this."

The PDF attachment was training content. It featured the logo of one of our major competitors and other identifying information. Except... the content was material that I wrote. Those mother f-ckers got our intellectual property - stuff I have slaved over and been abused about and taken flack for over the past 2 years - and repackaged it WORD FOR WORD.

Its no suprise. The world is a cold, hateful place and stuff like this happens. But its disappointing to say the least. Not to mention that the industry I work in has faced a lot of criticism over the years due to ethical issues. Recent upheaval and stronger regulations are supposedly "raising the bar in the industry and weeding out the unscrupulous players."

One of the ways the bar is supposedly being raised is by requiring minimum education to qualify for licensing. Which is where the company I work for comes in. We are approved to provide the education. But riddle me this Batman... how is the bar being raised when our competitors are just as shady and unethical as the scumbags that the education is intended to weed out??

I get a lot of grief because I tend to have a negative attitude - approach my world with the glass half empty. But honestly, a positive attitude is hard to come by when this is the kind of stuff life is made of. However, I will concede to one positive... despite the never ending criticism I get about my work, at least it was good enough for our scumbag competitor to steal and distribute with no changes.