Paranoia

Date: November 14, 2004

      One thing can be said about paranoia.
      It spreads worse than the viruses it is supposedly protecting you from.
      And I ended the sentence with a preposition on purpose.
     
      When I arrived at my new job, I was greeted with a Dell and software (all software) that had been "altered" to fit the company protection standards.
     
      This includes a fixed template for power point (after all of Microsoft's design efforts), weird fonts that someone sometime decreed were the standard (and that are not supported by any printer so you must put any file into PDF to print it - otherwise you get blank pages), a rigid style guide for datasheets - some of which makes no technical sense, and generally crippled software.
     
      This means I lug in my 17" Toshiba daily so I have something sane to work on. Ha!
     
      In addition to all of that, it is necessary to log in to any software such a Outlook, Internet Explorer, and sub pages on the company internal web pages.
     
      You can, on a good day, type your login 50 times a day.
      There has been considerable bitching about that.
      (The Toshiba bypasses all that - goes to the web directly - and is used for CNN and GOOGLE whenever - avoids all the login crap. However--- I cannot use Instant Messanger - which I was using to talk to my son.)
     
      Evidently, the complaints must have hit the high water mark somewhere because today we got an email about reduced logins.
     
      If we take a little security quiz.
      So I clicked the link and got a "page cannot be displayed" which sent me doubled over in hysterics.
      I must be a security risk.
      A great deal of hilarity was coming from other offices.
      The quiz is evidently pretty funny.
      Finally, after logging in about three times, I got the page up and took the quiz.
      I passed.
      Which got me this message:
      Note: If you want to have your reduced login privileges removed at any time, contact your local Support Center.
      Please tell me who in their right mind would want the reduced login removed???
      At least we have made one small step toward sanity.
      People who write virus programs have a lot to answer for.