Pursuit Sent Official Policies To Me As Google Docs
My permissions had been set to view only and options to copy, download, and print were disabled.
November 10, 2019
This is a follow up to my earlier post I Can No Longer Support Pursuit. In that post, I stated Pursuit had sent me updates about the Pursuit Bond earlier this year. Getting the Bond updates from Pursuit was maddening. I wondered why Pursuit continued to treat its Fellows so poorly. I began to wonder what game Pursuit was playing.
* * *
In the last week of February 2019, I received an email from Pursuit. It was from an employee I had never met before. This employee wanted to connect with me and share important updates about Pursuit. He asked if I had time over the next week or two to meet. I asked if we could do a phone call and we agreed to an appointment for a week later. Even though he said these updates were important, I wondered how important these updates could be if he gave me a window of two weeks to meet with him.
A week later (now the first week of March), we chatted on the phone. It started with the pleasantries of introducing ourselves. Then, the conversation took a weird turn. He asked me straight out if I was paying into the Bond. I was caught off guard. I had been paying into the Bond since the previous fall. Shouldn't he already know this? Even if he wouldn't have access to that information about me, why was this relevant? I answered that I was paying. My answer seemed to have determined the direction of the rest of the call. He talked at length about Pursuit's vision for the coding program, briefly alluded to updates to the Bond, and asked if I supported the program. I responded honestly that I could not support Pursuit wholeheartedly and I gave specific examples of my negative experience with the program. He spent the rest of the time trying to change my mind. After thirty minutes of this, we never got to talking about the Bond updates. I had to end the call because I had other appointments to attend.
I emailed him a followup the next day. I requested the updates about Pursuit and the Bond to be emailed to me. The next day, I received an email with links to four separate Google docs that detailed updates to the Bond. As I read the email, I realized my phone call with the Pursuit employee was not about connecting. The majority of the updates concerned the consequences of not paying. The intent of the phone call was to find delinquent payers. I felt extremely insulted. I felt Pursuit was treating me like a criminal.
I decided to send the links to my classmates. I knew a lot of them stopped answering all communications from Pursuit due to Pursuit's long pattern of untrustworthy behavior. I wanted my classmates to have the docs because they deserved this information. Pursuit should have just emailed these updates to everyone without requiring the Fellows to set up a meeting first. The docs totaled eighteen pages. That is too much content to review in a single meeting when the Fellow did not have access to it beforehand. I asked my classmates if they had been contacted by Pursuit about these updates. A few of my classmates mentioned they had been contacted by different employees. My classmates didn't have time in their schedules for a meeting and asked Pursuit to email the updates to them. Pursuit never replied back to them.
After I sent my classmates the links, they told me they couldn't view the docs. I went back to the Google docs to check my permissions. What I saw horrified and incensed me. My permissions were set to view only and the options to copy, download, or print any of the Google docs had been disabled. At this point, I felt I was in a dangerous game. Why did Pursuit send me official documents and not allow me to make a hard copy? For the next thirty minutes, I took screenshots of all eighteen pages and put them into my own Google doc. I sent my screenshots to my classmates.
I emailed the initial Pursuit employee to ask for a hard copy. I wanted an official hard copy from Pursuit and I wanted a record of the correspondence. After two days, I had to send another followup. I received a response that said he would follow up with me soon. I finally received PDF copies two days later. I was appalled that it took him an entire week to fulfill a simple request. All this Pursuit employee had to do was download the Google docs as PDFs and attach them to an email. Did he actually need to get approval to send me the PDFs? I took the time to skim the PDFs and the Google docs side by side. I wanted to make sure no information had been changed. I was not taking any chances. I sent those PDFs to my classmates, too.
* * *
I am speaking out about this event because there was so much that was wrong about it. After what happened, I knew I had to be very careful about my interactions with Pursuit from that point forward.
This essay was originally published on Medium.