In reply to cb294:
Yep company phone.
Full story is I took a guy on from a prison outreach program in to a sales roll. Before going down he was in a 70k sales job , owned a property business registered overseas for tax reasons and living the high life minted from importing containers of week and coke.
I took a chance on him as he convinced me that he put his past behind him and just wanted a chance to get back on his feet but no one would touch him due to his record.
When he went on holiday his work email was copied to a spare email in my office, he was aware of this. My office jumped on once a day to deal with whatever might need dealing with.
When he came back from holiday I forgot to cancel the copy.
3 weeks later he rang in sick on the Monday morning so I said take what time you need, it's no problem, Tuesday and Wednesday he text in and again I'm giving it the big health is more important than work bit.
Well on the Wednesday morning a customer rang me to say he had emailed some info but not had a reply and he needed a quote ASAP. I remembered I had forgotten to cancel the email copy so I logged in to find this mail and discovered the emails from one of my suppliers in Italy and the plane tickets they sent him to go there for an interview. Digging a bit deeper I found that he had been trying to email his personal email address with my customer database and other company information that he had access to as part of his sales job. I also found out that he was spending a lot of company time trying to
First phone call was to the supplier who confirmed that he signed in there on the Tuesday and Wednesday, second phone call was to EE who confirmed his work phone was in Manchester Airport at the right time for the flight.
Third phone call was to a HR consultant that I use to get the ball rolling to sack him. I didn't really need it because he was only with me for 9 months but I wanted to make sure everything was done correctly.
Had he booked some holiday time and not tried to steal my customer base we would have parted on good terms and I would have helped him out from a technical view point (good door opener but knew squat about the engineering side of the job) but throwing a sicky and trying to steal from me = see ya.
I binned the supplier too and passed on 200k of sales to my competition because without this supplier I was unable to see them through and I wanted to make damn sure they didn't get the direct sales after I had invested about 10k in setting them up in the first place.