Hello again. I recently got laid off from a position I was trying to make work for myself as a Business Intelligence Analyst. Once the manager who hired me, himself left the company 3-4 months into my position, the time budget to train me on a legacy accounting system dwindled to 5 minutes question time two out of every three days as the talented professional training me was then promoted to the whole other job of running IT.

I struggled with how the inventory part of the system worked, took extra time to get acclimated, and then the axe fell just as I was beginning to understand it. I’ve been fired before, the first time when I was weeding flowers (slowly in the afternoon, after blowing away everyone in the morning) at Lew’s Nursery, age 13.

This wasn’t that.

They needed more than what I was originally hired for; they said so at my exit interview. (I probably should have faced that down earlier and looked for an exit.) No hard feelings, either way. Seriously – my trainer/manager has offered to speak on my behalf as a reference.

It wasn’t convenient; it never is. It begins another gap in the experience on my CV, hopefully short. But I learned SO much. It even improved my writing.

The most poignant thing I think I learned (in a professional context) was, TL:DR is real. Just because you can write much, doesn’t mean you always should.

Part of my old job involved walking the production floor every morning and making sure the monitoring was right. Problems were usually some form of wrong selection on the console at any line. I would take note, which line, which job, which problem, and report that to a list of managers and executives. They’d eventually clear up, and I’d release a day or two of “no anomalies detected” reports, and then it would happen again.

In my first reports, I used to try to explain what had gone wrong. That got corrected almost immediately; nobody needed my take on that! I stopped reporting minutiae like minor quibbles in actual headcount, and sticking to correctible things like ending the clock before you go home.

My new brevity was complimented, rewarded, and reacted to, positively.

Nextly, use your existing data to check yourself. That applies not only to matching figures, such as on an Excel sheet, but also to the history, the truth and the circumstances you’ve encountered around you. Past is prologue and precedent, to misuse a quote, but it is, even for technical problems and common errors.

On the reporting side, I’d need to start by tuning a SQL query so that it matched the numbers out of the accounting system, being presented the accounting system’s way to the 4 people the accounting system had authorized. This involved such devices as selecting, SUMming or AVGing a particular field, sometimes out of two or three options of similar columns that Could Be the right one. The PDF copy of the proprietary data dictionary was appreciated greatly, but not as good as someone else’s prior knowledge to help you.

So when I’d nailed the numbers and understood my subject, I wanted to save that for always and forever. I might get peeled off to another subject area on my next project, only to come back to the original area weeks or even months later. My SQL Server directory in Documents on OneDrive grew to 50, then 100 queries, with long, descriptive titles, so that I could keep track of them from File Manager windows.

For writing, that is also true. Things you’ve explained before, even if you have to tweak them for modernity, still have value. You might need something you wrote very well a while ago for a similar problem. So, save your work. Since you want your best work in a shareable version, you can remove the proprietary information, but the thoughts, and the words came from you, and they demonstrate your talent as a writer. So, you should use them.

I have scripts and articles I wrote and then recorded for a help system at the job before this last one. Since they belong to the company, and that departure was abrupt, I can’t access them. But they are still my best work in Technical Writing, for now. I have a glowing blurb of reference from my then-manager about those, but it’s not the same.

I may try to recreate something like that in Loom.

I left this last job at its root because there wasn’t real training and very little help in the moment to do it, but I’ll also admit to being discouraged by the lack of help to the point I didn’t always ask for it, especially when I got stuck.

I’m not a SQL DBA, but if I’m not careful, what I was allowed to do could break replication, if I made some stupid mistake like failing to properly temp my tables before inserting, etc. That brought the wrong kind of attention, and then often extra restorative work that precluded discussing any query issue for the time being.

To mitigate the times when I got stuck, I would step away from the problem, and attempt to flush my mind by catching up on email or reading an article on a different topic. Frequently, I successfully re-engaged and solved the problem, but this also got flagged as inactivity when the wrong people saw it. I explained what I was doing, but it brought unnecessary friction to any prospect of the training process, and required extra understanding from my manager.

Don’t make my mistake: Always ask for help when you need it. Whenever you need it. If a helper cannot get to you now, usually they’ll either route you to one who can, or they’ll set a schedule. My manager would often have me work on another project until he could get 15 minutes to dive into the issue on this one. It’s expected you won’t know everything, every time.

People like me forget that sometimes and get nervous to bother someone, and all of us need to stop.

But I certainly can write a PIVOT query and APPLY aggregate functions to single rows, now. I got that going for me.

We’ve all seen it – “Please ignore any friend requests from me – I’ve been hacked!!”, then several sad and angry emojis, then friends chiming in over time, commenting “yeah, I got one (a duplicate friend request from ‘you’), too.” It happens to too many people, most of them perceived as senior on social media, but it can be anybody who’s not on the service full-time.

Facebook is the common place to see sketchy people (or bots) spoofing your friends, but it’s on Instagram, Twitter, and just about anywhere else, and happening to anyone. A victim may not even have an original account on the platform where the spoofing takes place.

So, technically, you/they didn’t get hacked, but spoofed. The good news is, it usually can be taken down, with a little help from friends.

First, let’s understand what happened. The offending act follows a simple and nefarious formula:

1. The impostor copied the victim’s public profile picture, public bio information, and sometimes cover picture to a new Facebook profile that the impostor set up under the victim’s name, with a spare character to distinguish the fake account from the true account.

2. The very next step that happens is, commonly, for the impostor to block the victim’s original account from this new profile. This prevents the victim from going out to the original friends list and calling the impostor out (or posting to that effect) to stop the scam, since the victim can’t see it.

3. Once all that’s set up, the offender will look through the victim’s friends list, and start attempting to connect with the friends on that list anew – the victim’s friends will notice this first. If called on it, the offender (impersonating the victim) will protest that (s)he forgot the original password, or was just feeling creative and wanted to do another one. If the friend is showing as sufficiently gullible, the impostor account may then appear in your Messenger chatstream, saying they’re stranded/in trouble somewhere, and, could you be a dear and Paypal/Venmo/Zelle them some money? If they’re nasty, they’ll post a link to malware impersonating you, with a phishing message.

Maybe money, grief, or malware isn’t the end result. But if this is you, you’ll still have wasted time and energy on a random scammer, impersonating your friend.

So, you can grow annoyed at the constant cycles of this on your timeline, like I once did, or you can get to work to make them go away, like a friend would do.

1. When you see this post on your timeline, or you receive the ‘duplicate’ friend request, your first impulse (and your friend’s fervent wish) is to reject or ignore it. So instead of accepting, or leaving it there to scam the next person, enter the name into Facebook search.

2. If you searched, you’ll see two accounts with the same picture, one of which (the original) appears with Friend underneath it as you are already friends. The one with friend request pending, or nothing if you already rejected it, is the one to report.

3. From the ellipse (…) menu, click on Report, then “for Impersonating”, “Someone Else”, and finally type or select the name of your friend.

Getting the account removed sometimes only takes one well-documented report – Facebook admins spend a lot of time ferreting out these types of attacks, and you filling out the ‘paperwork’ is a real help in this regard. It takes at most, two or three reports for a Facebook moderator to pull the plug on a real impostor.

Still, your five minutes of effort, even magnified by millions of real friends doing the right thing for real victims, may not equal the output for even the smallest of bot farms, but it’s the first line of defense for the people who clean this up for a living, and it’s a true good deed in the here and now.

You’ve saved somebody else the aggravation of tracking this down, and you hopefully don’t have to hear (from that friend, anyway) about how they’ve been “hacked.” It’s worth consideration to not always be coming to the rescue, as habitual de-scammers get known, and maybe impersonated (and then auto-blocked) themselves. But your family members and close friends are usually worth looking out for when it happens, every so often.

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I’ve sent this article out almost six times, revising it half as much. It started out as something I wrote for my mother after she was getting spoofed regularly along with her friends.