If Michael doesn't know the credit union software well enough to install the virus that he wrote, how the hell does he know it well enough to write a virus for it in the first place?
Maybe an intentional misstatement, perhaps it was he simply didn't have the access privileges to the computer network to do so? This seems more plausible since Peter did it himself - After getting his promotion, and corporations like that would more than likely have such access controls in place, however the average Joe probably wouldn't understand access controls so perhaps they 'dumbed it down' a bit by saying he didn't know how.
So what did they need Samir for? Peter's whole reason for including him in the scam was that he knew the software better than Michael (or Peter himself) did; if that wasn't the issue, what was?
From a software architecture standpoint, Michael's code probably runs as an independent process separate from the actual Initech credit union software — that way it's not part of the credit union code base and would not appear in reviews by any Initech developers. However, it's likely that deploying code to the mainframe is automated, and it has a monitor to detect any unauthorized processes running on the system; Samir is likely the one who can get Michael's code loaded and keep it from being flagged as an unauthorized process. Then the only way for anyone to find Michael's code would be to examine the processes on the mainframe itself, find the one that shouldn't be there, then dissect it to find Michael's skimming code.
Quick and easy money?
How does Tom manage to gain a seven-figure settlement in only a few days following his accident? In real life the case would be tied up for months or years.
It's never actually said that he had already received the money, it's just implied the money is incoming and a sure thing. Also note it was Drew the office idiot that tells them the story, so maybe the situation wasn't exactly as he says.
You may be confusing a settlement with money awarded by a court. Whatever entity was liable for Tom's injuries may have elected to settle with him immediately before there was ever a court case. This is actually much more common than movies and media make it seem... the majority of insurance claims, even potentially large ones, are just handled fairly quickly to get them over with, especially if Tom's injuries were confirmed by reputable medical professionals (as they would have been if he had to go to the hospital). An adjuster would have interviewed the other party, interviewed Tom, gone over the medical records, suggested a figure to the company, the company would have gone to Tom with that figure or a similar one and said "You can sign this waiver that says you won't sue and get this amount", and if Tom liked the figure he would probably get his money by the next Monday. (Companies often like to cut checks on Thursday or Friday.) The only real reason it would have been tied up for a ridiculous amount of time would be: if there was suspicion of fraud, if there was doubt as to liability, if Tom didn't want to settle for the amount they offered him and chose to pursue a court case instead, or if for some reason there was a truly stupid amount of money involved (as in "it's going to affect the entire company's profit reports for the fiscal year" amounts).
No one suspects Milton
How does no suspicion fall on Milton following the immolation of the Initech offices? He's never been particularly concerned about keeping his mumblings to himself, so surely someone should have thought that the guy who's constantly talking about committing arson might warrant some investigation? We never even see him brought in for questioning, and given that he's last seen in Mexico, a country with which the US has an extradition treaty, simply fleeing across the border wouldn't have helped him. Plus, it's remarked upon more than once that he doesn't seem entirely stable. Finally, unless Milton is phenomenally good at covering his tracks, an investigation (which I'm pretty sure is compulsory in these cases) would most likely have revealed that the fire was set deliberately.
Nobody paid any attention to Milton. Sure, he wasn't hiding his 'threats' to burn the place down, but that's because nobody was listening. Everyone's attitude toward him was along the lines of, "Oh ignore him and he'll go away." So when it came time to figure out what happened, if anyone had suggested, "What about Milton?" the response would've been, "What about who?"
It also isn't specifically stated as Mexico, just a country where the locals speak spanish. It could have been Costa Rica for all the viewer knows.
According to this, it is Mexico. Of course, since it's never mentioned on-screen, your point still stands; I have no idea if the US has extradition with Costa Rica or not.
Technically, Milton has a great alibi if he knew he wasn't on the payroll right before the fire. They'd have to show that Milton was working for weeks/months without being paid which might cost them more from fines and lawsuits than just rebuilding from a fire. It's been a while, but was the fire shown to be intentionally set or implied? I'm sure he just skipped town after finding several million dollars in an envelope while trying to steal back his stapler.
It was never shown to be Milton's doing but with his constant threats of burning down the place, the fact that he was constantly bullied by people in the office, and the fact that he quietly ran away from the scene...I think it's very obvious that Milton did it.
We don't know that he did get away. Investigations can be slow. According to Google Maps, it's about a six hour drive from Dallas to Mexico. In the 90s, pre-War on Terror and the hysteria about securing the border, I find it very believable that it would take more than six hours to determine the fire was arson, identify a suspect and get his name, photo, etc. to the Border Patrol. Once Milton is in Mexico, Mexican cops are probably not that motivated to find an American arsonist. And if they do, Milton has money The scene with him at the resort could have been the day after he set the fire. We don't know that he wasn't arrested a few days afterwards anyway.
Milton was likely never a suspect. Investigators would have to know he was there in the first place, and since he was technically fired five years ago the police would have had no reason to believe he would be there even if a glitch meant he was still getting a paycheck. It's also established nobody who works there except Lumbergh and maybe the Bobs even know who he is, so none of them would mention his working there either. The audience knows the full story, but from the perspective of the police there's no evidence pointing to Milton.
Trying to get willingly fired (somehow)
After his epiphany, Peter spends what must be a matter of weeks completely blowing off his job—not showing up, wearing casual dress and vandalizing company property when he does, not doing the job that he's fucking paid to do—and yet Lumbergh doesn't fire him, or even write him up. Hell, he even gets promoted, which surely Lumbergh should have had enough pull with the higher-ups to put a stop to.
Lumbergh WAS about to discipline/fire Peter... but then finds out that Peter has an 'in' with the Bobs. Since it was made obvious that the Bobs were a threat even to Lumbergh's job, Bill decides not to mess with someone they've deemed valuable.
Anyone who has worked in a similar environment knows that it is very hard to get fired from a job like this. Almost any office has a story of a guy who skipped two weeks or began openly breaking the rules, and yet still was allowed to keep his job. Scott Adams tells a story of a coworker who was trying to get fired but ultimately was not. One could point out that with the Bobs around, and the company seemingly desperate to cut expenses, that such an employee would be the prime target for termination in such an environment, but there are multiple stories of the slackers and fuckups keeping their job while much better employees are let go due to issues like earning more, or being too outspoken about the need for improvement or job satisfaction.
I have a personal example of exactly this. Despite the fact that I produced consistently better numbers and more output than my peers, I got a terrible performance evaluation (and the incompetent asshole that everybody hated got rated at the top simply because he constantly kissed our boss's ass), so I said 'hell with it' and actually made a conscious decision to be a useless piece of crap while I looked for a different job. I did as little as possible, simply didn't show up to a bunch of meetings, tossed paperwork in the trash, actually threatened to punch the aforementioned incompetent asshole in the face if he didn't shut up and get away from me, slightly rearranged my desk so nobody could actually see my screen without walking past my desk and looking and then spent probably 1/3-1/2 of my workday watching Youtube, playing flash games (Kongregate and Armorgames ftw) and searching for another job on company time. I'd say I did MAYBE 1/8th the work that I had been doing previously, and yet my next performance review was BETTER, and the moron actually congratulated me on 'fixing my issues'. Needless to say I didn't stay working for him much longer and left as soon as I secured another job offer. It happens, some managers are just utterly incompetent at actual management.
Some of the satirical elements of this movie are meant to poke fun at the fear of confrontation held by people in management positions. The most clear-cut example of this is when the Bobs say that they won't be firing Milton directly, having "fixed the glitch" that was giving him a regular paycheck and preferring to "let it work itself out" (i.e., they expect Milton will stop coming to work if he's not getting paid). Other examples aren't quite as explicit, but the way those in management speak and their inability to be direct with their subordinates (e.g. Joanna's boss at Chotchkie's trying to get her to wear more flair without actually telling her to do so) is another, more subtle, use of this theme. It is shown to an extreme with Peter's insubordinate behaviour, taking what could arguably be Truth in Television to Refuge in Audacity for the sake of comedy.
Probably the bigger question concerning Milton is that apparently all it takes to keep working after being laid off is to have no one tell him and for payroll to never be updated? When a company like Initech lets someone go, this means an immediate deactivation of their ID badges, passwords, corporate cell phone, etc. Building security is alerted that this person is no longer an employee. None of their applications or shared network drives would keep working. So, in reality, Milton might have kept getting paid, but surely he would also have been pestering Lumbergh or one of the other bosses all day, every day, about why he can no longer seem to login to or access anything. That's assuming he could even get into the building.
Actually, where exactly was it implied that Lumbergh could be fired by the Bobs? They were third party consultants that he hired to (essentially) do his dirty work for him. Plus, he was the company vice president.
It was never implied that Lumbergh, himself, hired the Bobs. It could have been from the CEO of Initech. Also, the Bobs pull out Lumbergh's file and it looks exactly like everyone else's. This implies his "use" in the company is just as subject to analysis as anyone else's.
Yes, this is where it's implied that Lumbergh is also being reviewed. When the Bobs recommend Peter for promotion Lumbergh disagrees, stating that Peter's been 'real flaky lately' and that he's been having problems with his TPS reports. The Bobs then say the don't think the problem is with Peter, but rather that Lumbergh hasn't been challenging him enough. The Bobs then pull out Lumbergh's file and start questioning him about how he spends his time at work, which as the Troper above states, implies that Lumbergh is just as much under review as everyone else.
The simple fact is that when a company is losing money badly, some of those highest on the chopping block are those who are paid the highest but whose duties could easily be done by subordinates. After all, Lumbergh is one of eight managers for what appear to be only about 30ish people.
Legal Houdini
Why does the movie let Peter, Michael and Samir get away with committing felonious theft? Seriously, no punishment at all. In fact, Peter's better off than he was before. Maybe Peter's just that awesome, but it still bugs me.
Losing the money isn't that big of a deal? Also: why would it bug you? That's... insane. Even if they hadn't lost the money. "Oh no, poor soulless corporation." It wasn't even that big of a sum for a friggin' comedy movie.
Because the protagonists freaking out over getting sent to prison is a lot funnier than them actually getting sent to prison.
Because they are the protagonists? It's like asking why the protagonists of a heist movie never get arrested.
For the same reason why it never even crosses anyone's mind that Milton might have been the one to set the fire at the end. The entire movie is satirical - it takes situations that might happen and turns them up a notch. Them getting caught would have changed the entire tone of the movie.
Burning it down for nothin'
Most companies keep a duplicate of their records off-site for exactly this sort of contingency. Merely burning the place down wouldn't have saved Peter; the evidence of what he and the others did is still around, unless Initech is so monumentally bad at what they do that they only kept one set of records. Not bloody likely, even in 1999 when the movie was released. Plus, his bosses may be evil, but evil =/= stupid.
While companies that don't have their heads up their asses do regular backups, Initech looks like the type that would stretch out backups beyond what would be reasonable just to save money. So it could have gone unnoticed in the span of two business days.
They're having Peter work 7 days a week to add "19" manually to the year number of individual entries; there's no way a shell couldn't do that. This place is falling apart IT-wise.
Believe me, it's not — or rather wasn't — that easy. I helped re-code dozens of programs within one system for Y2K issues. The variable in which the two-digit year value was stored was differently named in most of them. Even if one knew which numbers represented years and which didn't accurately, it's still not just a matter of adding 1900 or sticking a "19" in there. Every program's usage was slightly different and had its own peculiar issues.
It's important to keep in mind the time period in which this movie was made. While things like cloud computing and online backups are pretty standard in a modern day IT environment, they didn't yet exist in 1999 (or, more accurately, 1998 since that's the year Office Space was filmed). You basically had to save backed up data to a floppy disk or CD Rom and then store it away somewhere safe. It's entirely possible that Initech did in fact keep their software regularly backed up. But, since Milton burned the place down, he burned the backups as well.
It's much more likely that backups would be onto magnetic tape (that's what this troper was doing in 1999!) and then taken off-site. Although Initech seems like just the kind of company that wouldn't bother with that last part.
The SOP (Standard Operating Procedure) at that time would be Tape Backups which would have been stored either off-site or in a fireproof safe. I doubt they have a very good COOP (Continuation of Operations Procedure) or DRP (Disaster Recovery Procedure) but at most they're gonna to be able to obtain records with a week or less. Most organizations aim for within 24 hours. Of course if they'd fired or laid off the personal who know how to open the safe, access the tape's location, and read the data on them then it'll take longer but unless the tapes were damaged beyond repair they're going to be able to restore at least the data from the end of last month.
With that said, Michael, Pete and Samir installed that virus a mere four days before Initech burned down. It's very likely that their most recent backup happened before the virus was installed, particularly given what Michael said about Initech being "so backed up with all the software we're updating for the year 2000 that they'd never notice."
Traveller's Check Redundancy?
When Peter withdrawals funds, he gets traveler's checks. Isn't the point of traveler's checks that if they are stolen, lost or destroyed they can be replaced? So after the building went down in flames couldn't he have reported them stolen or destroyed and got all the money back scot-free?
He might have just been glad to be rid of it at that point. He just got away with committing fraud and avoided federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison; he might have figured that trying to get the money back would be tempting fate just a little too much.
Also he doesn't want the money, he just thought it was a good idea at the time because he was so relaxed.
Extra copies are needed, a bit more on that virus
Why is the virus on Michael's computer? Wouldn't it be better to have copied it over to a floppy before they even got to work? Unless he programmed the virus at work it shouldn't be on his computer at all.
That does seem to be the implication, that Michael programmed the virus at work, in his cubicle, using his company-issued desktop. Either he doesn't have a computer at home (which, considering it was 1999 and Hollywood is often slow to catch up with the times, might have been the case) or there's something in his work computer he needs to program the virus that he can't download to a disk and take home with him (no idea what that might be though).
Why wouldn't he program the virus at work? He already loathes his job as much as he's physically capable of doing...
Another factor to take. Their code handles large amounts of money. They may not be able to bring or remove anything like a floppy disk or usb drive.
More on that virus (even more)
You'd expect that a good programmer would think to name his virus something that doesn't have the word "VIRUS" in the file name, but apparently not.
They probably thought that no one at Initech would notice, or care. And they were probably right.
Also makes it clearer for the audience. If the file said "Additional Initech Y2K Update Software" some of the folks watching would've wondered if Mike gave him the wrong disc.
OS software mismatch
Why do their PCs run Mac software?
(From IMDB): "When Peter shuts down his computer, it shares characteristics with both Macintosh and DOS-based computers, including a hybrid Mac/Windows GUI, an A: drive and a C:\ prompt. The movie is set in a generic, universally-identifiable world, and the hybrid computer is clearly a carefully-planned gag based around that theme, rather than a goof."
Two in-universe possibilities:
1. Michael built his own computer from whatever he could find, thus the aspects of both Mac and PC (which is completely possible IRL).
2. Initech is so cheap, they grab whatever hardware and/or software they can get at the lowest price, be it via begging, borrowing, or stealing, and let their employees sort it out (this kind of merges with the 1st possibility).
3rd possibility the Mac os Star Trek project made it to a finale release and wine or software like Executor was made for it. (mac os star trek had a dos based boot up just like windows 9X)
Esoteric Happy Ending?
Peter's supposedly happy ending raises at least one question: isn't he making significantly less money now? I know that skilled laborers get paid quite a bit but this looked like an entry-level construction job considering that he just got it despite not having worked in construction before. Chances are pretty good that he's making at least one figure less than he used to, not to mention that the only benefits he probably has now are Workman's Comp, which would only protect him from on-the-job injuries and would be useless if he needed, say, dental work.
It's possibly in fitting with the theme of "a soulless, yet stable job isn't enough to keep Peter happy." It's a better alternative than his dream of "doing nothing."
It's also possible that his friendship with Lawrence got him an in for a higher-than-entry level job.
Additionally, it's possible that his job at Initech was entry-level as well. He drove a cheap car and lived in a relatively cheap apartment, so he probably wasn't making tons of money there either.
Bloody hate the ending. A man who's too lazy to work at a computer wouldn't be happy breaking his back on a building site and wouldn't be physically able for it.
This is not strictly true. Office work may not be physically taxing but it can be mentally draining, and many who work in offices enjoy doing physical activity when not on the job due to how it can re-energize them (and Peter is shown doing things like fishing, and enjoying it). Anyone who works in an office will hear complaints from their coworkers (or be the one complaining) that sitting in chairs all day and staring at screens is exhausting, but will also talk about the jog they took that morning, going to the gym later or going hiking on the weekend. Peter's real issue isn't laziness, even if that's the word used, it's that his job is killing him mentally. Being outside in fresh air and more sunlight, and being able to walk around more, is exactly the serotonin boost Peter seemed to need.
The money was never the point for Peter, he only brought up the scheme to steal from Initiech after he learned his friends were being fired and he realized how hard things were about to get for them. For him it was motivated by revenge and "Let's stick it to The Man!" He hated the Initech job for itself, not because it was low-paying, and presumably he will be happier at a construction job simply because it isn't Initech, even if it's a lower pay. There are many stories in real life about people quitting high-paying jobs and being happier in their new lives because there's less stress/they're outdoors/there's fewer people/etc.
When Peter describes his job to Joanna, it's very clear that despite calling himself a "software engineer," he really isn't one. His whole job consists of changing the years in existing software from "1999" to "2000" rather than doing any actual programming/development. So he's basically just a clerical worker, doing a job that's below even secretary work. It's also possible that Samir and Michael are, in fact, actual software engineers with much higher salaries - which would help explain why they aren't on board with Peter's constant misery until after they find out that they're being laid off.
The dufflebag
Why did Peter pack up a duffel bag before he went over to Initech to presumably get arrested? It's not like he could've brought his clothes to prison.
When you're taken into custody they hold on to what you have at the time of arrest. He probably wanted to have essentials for when he got out.
Did she cheat?
Did Anne cheat on Peter with Michael, Samir, and/or Lawrence? It sounded like they all knew from experience when they agreed with Peter's suspicions about her.
I think her infidelity was obvious to everyone except Peter. Always the last to know...
How is the arson a Deus Ex Machina?
The burning of Initech has been described as a Deus ex Machina, which is defined in the link as "when some new event, character, ability, or object solves a seemingly unsolvable problem in a sudden, unexpected way." The arson is a new event, but Milton had been threatening to do it throughout the movie, and near the end he outright said "that's the last straw," so how is his delivery on the threat sudden or unexpected?
I can assure you that there are people who, on watching Office Space for the first time, didn't expect Milton to actually follow through with his threat to burn down the office — just like the people of Initech, they've dismissed Milton's constant mumblings as mere background noise and never gave it a second thought. And from an in-universe perspective, the office fire was definitely unexpected for Peter, who had resigned himself to a trip to federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison and wouldn't have expected any salvation at all, much less a fire that'd lead him to a new job.
it is Mexico. Of course, since it's never mentioned on-screen, your point still stands; I have no idea if the US has extradition with Costa Rica or not.