@cdaquila …. Carolyn, I see that warning that the screen shot shows once in while. I just click the refresh button so I don’t see a real problem here.
I have no problem with the usual IT security stuff like behaving professionally. I read the newspaper on line at lunch and for a few minutes in the early morning, but otherwise it’s strictly business. The problem I have is when IT security does things that clearly obstruct the ability of other employees to do their jobs, and don’t care at all about the problems they cause. Their attitude is that everyone else can just shut up and get out of the way. They say you can’t use software they don’t provide. I used a $75 program to do my job, but they wanted me to buy one that’s cost $2000 a year and then I had to write the code to do the job. The cheap program did everything already.
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Years ago when I was doing consulting…an Insurance company hired me for a 6-month contract to fix and enhance one of their desktop applications written in Visual Basic and C++. So I get my desk-top all setup from IT and Visual Basic and C++ wasn’t installed. I contacted IT and they told me that those are NOT authorized applications. I tried to explain to them that I NEEDED them to do the work I was hired to do. Nope…Not authorized. The manager who hired me was out of town for a few days. When he got back he checked in with me to see if I understood the application. When I told him the situation…he was LIVID. We’ve worked together before a few times and he NEVER EVER gets mad. He marched down to IT (I followed to watch)…and he basically tore the IT manager a new one. They still had to pay me (actually the consulting company I was working for) for the time I was just sitting around doing nothing. My manager then charged that back to the IT department. At $120/hr * 24 hours…they weren’t happy. But they learned their lesson. My contract was continued for another 2 years.
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I didn’t say that my solution was to load the program anyway. It didn’t modify the Windows registry, and I got away with it. I think the local IT folks knew I had the program loaded, but they never said anything. I can’t get away with that now, so I just go home and use my own laptop.
I wish I could have visited the corporate IT security people and told them directly what a problem they were, but I wasn’t going to Utah to do that.
I think somewhere they must have a national convention where all the security folks get together to discuss ways of being jerks and to promote their own importance. I wonder where these important people were at Target or Equifax when we all got creamed?
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I love any story that sticks it to a dictator-like IT department!
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