In both cases, critical data with no backups was deleted by an ex-employee. In the "first day" story, it just happened to be both his first day and last day. I guess the difference is that one was a developer and the other an admin. No telling from this story if the person who deleted the data was an employee when they deleted the data.

If you take Verelox's word for it. Or if you want to be more conspiratorial, you could see your firing on the wall, tweak the new hire docs to lead to trashing prod, and just wait for the inevitable.

Or these two events are unrelated. Or the whole deleted prod on day 1 story is made up.