If any one gives a shit, sorry for the delay in website updates.
I won’t go into specifics but I work at a large company. And I do IT support. We deal with so many people and so many different situations that on occasion, people say some really out there shit. The biggest thing is understanding the reason why they do what they do. Some times there is method to the madness. Other times they are just dicks.
This entry starts with a user who tried to a visit a blog on work Internet. Naturally enough, it was blocked. So he sent through a request asking for it to be unblocked and we always ask for a business reason. If a site has been blocked there is usually good reason for it. So we need an equally good reason to unblock it.
He emailed me directly with,
“What is the process to change policy as this is becoming a more frequent occurrence. Do the policy makers realise that the majority of good I.T. development articles / periodicals exist of technical blogs ?”
I replied with,
“It is simply too hard (next to impossible, almost) to go through to internet and find every blog available that might relate to something technical and allow it. The other method would be to allow blogs to be access through our network which is also not a viable option. So my suggestion is when a site does pop up that is exception from the category, please send it through to help desk and we will unblock the website for you. It might seem like an ineffective way but from a System Admin perspective, there is really no specific way of telling.”
If anyone sees anything wrong with what I have said so far, please let me know. I thought it was a reasonable explanation to why things are the way they are.
He comes back with,
“Ok thanks Ben no worries. Sounds like it s a symptom of a bigger problem to me, fundamentally if this has to be done it’s a clear statement that your company does not trust its employees. Purely an Aussie phenomenon in my experience. Elsewhere the assumption is you trust your employees.”
I get this reply and I am so close to having a fuckin aneurysm. I started writing an email of epic proportions. Firstly, I am not high enough in the ranks to make a comment so I stopped writing the big email which essential spelt out that he was, indeed, a giant knob and that he should shut the fuck up.
I said,
“Due to past experiences, we have an acceptable use policy. This decision was made higher up by someone more qualified.”
It was best that I kept it short and simple so that I don’t fly right off the handles and say something that may make me lose my job.
Several emails were sent through directly to me from this user like I had some sort of saying in all of this (which I do not). And he kept on about it -
“Due to past experiences, we have an acceptable use policy - Understood. This decision was made higher up by someone more qualified - “Qualified”, well I guess we’ll have to disagree there.”
For the below email to make sense, one of the other emails he sent through were links to websites (one contained in the email below) which contain articles from people who not only do not have academic precedence to make comment apart from the fact that they are opinionated fuckfaces but have a completely illogical and completely wrong way at looking at the topic. Maybe there is a group of these people and they write “technical blogs” which this mindless idiot subscribes to which is why he wanted the site unblocked in the first place.
This was the email I was going to send but decided against it in response to his “Trust your employees” comment:
“There are many considerations you are missing here.
Firstly, I think you will find this does not just apply to our company. For any company our size, there needs to be some sort of computer management. Whenever you log on to any system, you automatically accept the Acceptable Use Policy. A good reason to provide some kind of management is we at helpdesk get requests/jobs on a daily basis to unblock websites (like the one you received this morning) or emails that either contains potentially contains virus’ or has not relativity to business work.
If we trusted our users and allowed our users to anything, we are opening up the Network and user information to many problems/exploitations. Not to mention the potential amount of time that would be wasted on websites that are not business-orientated because if it is not business-orientated, then why would a user require access? If it was someone’s job to promote our company out on the world wide web, then we make exceptions for those people. So to ensure that our network does not run amok with virus’ and information exploitations, we block certain things.
While you have some users who know what they are doing with computers, you have some who do not understand the consequences of their actions (especially with our company when you have a user who spends 95% of their time on sites and have very little to do with computers which is not uncommon) and then has to spend the rest of their time entering data in the computer. When he visits a legitimate website and a link/ad appears which takes him to a site which may contain some sort of malicious virus. We have trusted this user with our system and he has created a virus. Now take this one user and say that 1 in 100 users is like him/her. In a real world scenario, the rate is much lower than this but in our system this equates to about 60 users. Is this the sort of person you want to trust? I don’t think this is a trust issue.
Having no computer management and trusting users on a computer system is like saying we do not need the police force because we are trusting people.
The link that you had sent me (http://www.econtentm … Fire-Them)-50695.htm) has a few flaws.
1. “Develop guidelines about what employees can and cannot do at work”. We already have guidelines here. It’s called an Acceptable Use Policy. When you enter into our system, you accept the terms and conditions for using our system. You accept our culture. You will get this on 99% of all systems.
2. Have standards on their job rather than the system that they are using? So, we put more pressure/stress/work on managerial and HR staff because they spend time putting out fires when an effectively managed system could fix these problems? Let every one have at it. How do you go about managing 100s (possibly 1000s) of users who refuse to spend time doing work when the system is so open? It is already hard enough for managers to fire people without there being any backlash or further consequences.
3. What about the user that just clicked on an ad and downloaded a file because we trusted them and now we have a system-wide virus that McAfee now has to clean up?
4. These “excuses” are more than valid. E.g. We had a report that a site over in WA was running extremely slow. Further investigation revealed that users had utilized the link to download 3gb Youtube files. None of it had anything to do with work. How do you explain that?”
Then I spent some more time away from work with that link above and I thought of more things:
5. “…Corporate guidelines could provide such details as employees can’t reveal secrets, can’t use inside information to trade stock or influence prices, and must be transparent and provide their real name and affiliation when communicating—guidelines that will guide an organization through a lot of potentially sticky situations, not just internet-related ones.” You create this guideline. Based on not having anything to actually enforce it (deeming it fucking useless), what do you do when 50% of your users ignore this policy? If could enforce it, how do enforce something like this? Put it in the Acceptable Use Policy and just expect everyone to adhere? When you open up communication more, you also have a greater chance of having confidential information slip out.
6. “As long as your employees get their work done satisfactorily, there should be no need to micromanage behavior. You don’t regulate how often people can use the restroom, when they can chat with a colleague in the hallway about their kids, or mobile phone use while taking a cigarette break, so why regulate when people can and cannot look at an online video?” There should not be any need to micromanage behavior but if this author was apart of the REAL WORLD, he will know this is required. This is fine if you have 10 people on your system/network. What happens on a much grander scale when you have 1000s of users? You COULD trust them. Let’s say you do. And even 10% of users or even 10 users not following acceptable use and downloading porn. 10 users is manageable. To fire 10 users would be a managers nightmare if they have to then find 10 users to replace them if they were all from the same area. The email (above) found that it only took 1 user to clog up a remote site. And we have many remote sites. So, do we manage those small sites so nothing like that ever happens again but not other sites which have more bandwidth available? Or do we allow them to do what they want so history can repeat itself?
While it all sounds like Trust issues but they are all realistic issues that are all based on past events. And only 25% of companies block media access?!? I would like to find out which companies allow access to media-based websites so I can spend my time not doing any work and then when I am threatened with fired, I will kick up a stink. It’ll be a sweet life. Or find a way so I can spend 6 out of the 8 hours doing work and the other 2 browsin’ youtube and download 2gb a week on youtube videos, browsing facebook, myspace or twitter.
I am so very sure that if anyone was going to make any comment on the www, it would be something negative or defamatory. Because this dick knew ANYTHING about human behavior, he would know that if a person received a good experience somewhere, s/he will tell 2 people. If s/he had a bad experience, they will tell 5. Not to mention if the option was to present itself to waste time on websites or work I know which option I would be taking.
Then I had a thought that no matter what I am going to say, this wanker will believe he is right even if I can improve him wrong. It just doesn’t make sense. But what did make sense is if people like this exist, than it would explain why Bush got elected, Scientology, why any one would care what happens to celebrities and various other things I don’t understand how any one can see appeal or would waste time on.