not falling down

We got new evacuation instructions for our building today. Before, we had to alternate in the east and west stairwells by floor, which was a pain to remember. Now, the instructions are to go to the east stairwell if you’re on the east side, and the west stairwell if you’re on the west side. You got to whichever stairwell is closest. It’s that simple!

In the last ten minutes, I’ve heard two people come up and ask the Lady in the Next Cube whether we’re on the east or west side.

Overheard from the next cube, on the phone, just now:

“I know! I put a big… oh em gee exclamation point exclamation point!”

I got promoted!

I have to run this query that returns a ridiculous result, at least two million rows, and output it to a file with Oracle’s little command-line client, SQLPLUS. I can’t get it to stop printing the results on the screen as it writes to that file, though, which means that there’s this endless speed-scrolling text in a big window behind my little browser here.

I feel like I should be telling my fellow superspies that “I’m almost done hacking the 256-bit upload! Activate the crypto-matrix cybertrap on my mark!“

My boss in her cube, cussing into the phone in theatrical Spanish: maybe the best thing ever?

(I should add that I adore my boss.)

There is a new Lady in the Next Cube.

LitNC: “You know what I think? They need to–grow some, and tell that bitch–they let her run that place. You know? She’s an adjuster.“

Strutting around like she owns the place! She’s a loose cannon! She can’t be trusted! Hand over your badge!

I just heard two of the people at my job say “make yourself a dang quesadilla!”

The movie has jumped the shark, friends. It has jumped with both skis flailing.

Tangentially, there’s a pretty new place across from my job that’s either a school for the blind or a blindness advocacy group–I can’t remember. Anyway, their logo image is Braille, I think four letters, which presumably matches up with the acronym of their name (at least it does on the sign out front). This logo is repeated around the walls of the building.

Several feet above head level.

With incandescent light bulbs.

Interestingly, I could soon be in direct receipt of government pork. Updates as things solidify (or fail to do so).

There’s a new piece of abstract crayon-collage art in one of the hallways at work–you know the kind, a bunch of rough purple splotches and gold squiggles. Designed to be exciting in the most boring way possible.

It’s about 36″ x 24″. When I came in this morning, it was hanging like a landscape, long side horizontal.

When I left, it was hanging like a portrait.

Hey, wanna see if you’re a terrorist? Excuse me–”Specially Designated National or Blocked Person?” Thanks to the Department of the Treasury, you can, in PDF or ASCII flavors! (As stated above, I do feel like getting arrested, so I was going to write a form script that would search the file for you, but it’s 1.35Mb of unmarked-up plaintext, and I don’t want to kill my webhost with that much sequential search.)

I’m aware of this list because today I had to write down some personal info and sign a release form at work. My company could be getting a federal contractor as a client, so every employee name has to be checked against the list. Fair enough. I don’t like that, but it is the law.

I do have a problem, though, with the fact that we contracted an outside firm to do the checking. Everybody in this company had to sign a paper saying that neither my employer nor this firm were liable for any consequence of having yourself checked. Then everybody had to print his or her first, middle and last names, DOB, and SSN. The forms will be sent off to VeriCorp, who of course can be trusted with my SSN and corresponding information! I guess!

Keep in mind that my employers are probably paying thousands of dollars for this: VeriCorp is going to take a list of a few hundred names, then they’re going to take the text file linked above, and they’re going to have some people hit CTRL-F a few times. And if one of those people makes a typo and you go to Secret Terrorist Jail, whoops! Oh well! They’re not liable!

I am making use of hyperbole here, obviously. Nobody’s going to go to jail; if you’re on the SDN list and the FBI doesn’t know where you are, you’re certainly not going to be working under your real name, much less putting it down on that form. This whole thing is a redundancy measure, a legal fallback.

My point is that there is no reason to be sending hundreds of people’s personal info to an outside contractor, liability-free, when the list is publicly available, and we have an in-house software development team who are all experts at data correlation. I guess the potential client doesn’t trust us to verify our own employees, because we’re an interested party in the negotiations. But if they don’t trust us to verify the information correctly, why trust us to send it correctly in the first place?