I can probably count on my hand the times I was caught doing something shady in three years at my old job. Those times were not fun by any means.
About a year into my employment at Generic Bank, my entire daily job was to certify that the build of my team’s application was stable on various servers. Basically, two or three times a day, somebody would tell me that a certain server was ready and I would run tests against it.
I did this by typing one line and hitting the enter button.
This was interesting for a week or two until I realized that if we were ever getting errors, it would always ended up as one about three different problems. Usually somebody from another group would have databmissing from their database or another system was down for maintenance, etc.
Naturally, I was getting quite bored, but by no means wanted to ask for more work.
I soon realized that all of the communication I did was through instant messaging rather than face to face interaction. Why was I sitting at the office all day when I could be at home?
I came up with a plan. My division of the bank had full rights to download any applications off of the Internet. I found a program that allowed me to control my desktop in my office from home on my laptop. I just had to download the program at on both computers, login, and, voila, I could be on my couch watching television with the laptop sitting in front of me.
Of course, I would always have to put in an appearance at the office. The builds were usually around 10 am and 2 pm, so I would regularly arrive at the office around 9:30 or so. I would fiddle around at my desk until I got notification to kick off the tests. (They took about 30 minutes to run.) After kicking them off, I walked around to make sure that my presence was known. Brad is at the office today.
I would check the initial logs from the tests, discover the location of important people, and if everything seemed quiet, I’d slip out and around the back door and head home. Fifteen minutes later I would log in and not tell anybody I was working work home unless blatantly asked.
The wrinkle was that when I moved my mouse pointer on the laptop, it also moved it on my screen at the office. I couldn’t turn the monitor off in my cube or people would know for sure that I had left the office.
The first few times I did it was a little nerve wracking, but I soon got in a nice little groove where I could do this at least 2 or 3 times a week. It went on for a few months.
One day I came back to work and my coworker Sheshank approached me in the hallway and asked to talk. I experienced the familiar tingle in my spine of job related nervousness.
With a grave face, he told me that he had walked by my desk and seen my mouse pointer moving. He wanted to know what was going on. I got hot and sweaty. Sheshank was a good guy and I thought I could trust that he wouldn’t tell anybody else. I had also never seen him so serious.
I explained that sometimes I ran the tests from home if I was there for lunch, or had bad allergies. I realized how random and unconnected these two reasons were, but kept my mouth shut.
Sheshank asked what program I was using because he had never seen it before. I told him where I downloaded it and he reminded me that the group had only one approved tool for accessing your desktop remotely. Using an unapproved program could be a security risk. Not locking my computer when I went home was a security risk.
I nodded my head vigorously and apologized profusely. My eyes widened as I told him that I wouldn’t use it again. I’d remove it from both computers. I would be a better person in general. He accepted all I said and walked away slowly. I prayed that he wouldn’t tell anybody else.
As far as I know, he never did. Deep down I knew that there was a flaw to the scheme, but I still went ahead with it anyways. I’m just lucky the person who found out was a good person.
I learned my lesson and went on to become CEO of the company and lord over 120,000 employees worldwide.
Okay, I just stopped doing it and slacked off at my desk instead. I began to miss the daytime television that I had come to enjoy on my lazy afternoon at work from my couch.
Technorati Tags: caught, work humor, slacking
March 23rd, 2007 at 9:04 am
Just an FYI, you should try using remote desktop (aka terminal services) and logging on to your work computer as another user with all the same privileges as the user you normally log on as.
That way your mouse cursor doesn’t move when you move it through remote desktop because you are logged on to a completely different desktop and as a completely different user than the one displayed on the monitor. Actually you could even set it up to login as the same user but a different desktop.
Shouldnt be too hard. VPN to the network, connect to your computer through terminal services (remote desktop), make sure the user is not on the “console” (what is displayed on the monitor). Done. That should work if you have the balls to try it again