While working as the CTO for a startup (read Vaporware), sales weren't doing well and the founder had been pouring tons of money in, without closing enough deals. We finally had the long, hard conversation about the future and both agreed that it was time to shut down the business so she could cut her losses.
We made a continuity plan for our customers that not only took care of them, but kept her earning revenue for about a year to help pay off some of the expenses. We were at the end of our rental agreement so we shut down the office to save money and moved computers into our houses for the ramp down period.
We completed the first work day from home, everything was going according to plan, and I called it a day. The next morning, I tried to login to our systems and couldn't. This was really odd as I was the one in charge of all of our systems, and I certainly hadn't done anything. After making a few calls I found out that every single employee with any tech experience had been locked out.
At this point I called one of our consultants, who was operating as the sysadmin for our public web servers. His response was "I know what happened but I can't help you." After a lot of pushing he finally admitted that the CEO had issued the request. At this point I called her repeatedly and got no answer.
At this point I spent the rest of the day updating my resume and looking for work, while calling off and on throughout the day. I still got no answers and didn't sleep well that night. The next day was Friday and I resumed calling. Later that afternoon one of the other employees called me and asked, "hey, did you get paid today?" I hadn't thought to check yet, but it was definitely pay day. I logged into my bank account and ... nothing. I called up the other employees and got the same message. I tried calling the CEO again and ... nothing.
At that point I drafted a nice long email to the CEO's husband, an attorney (read Closing Time), let him know what happened including the missing payroll. He ended up cutting personal checks for each employee which I picked up the next Monday and delivered all of the remaining computers and office equipment to his house. Needless to say, that was an awkward interaction.
