Yesterday the grumpy man who came to install new software on the spare workstation at my cube asked me “when was the last time you rebooted this?”

“Monday,” I said, “I haven’t had a reason to touch it all week.”

“That means you left it on overnight,” he grumped. “That leaves our network vulnerable. We take a dim view of that.”

Imagine that the italics represent anger. And I was like, yeah, okay, he’s probably right and I should have thought of that. I apologized. A few minutes after he left, I realized:

1. That workstation has no Internet connectivity–it’s only on the intranet here, and has to dial out for anything else.
2. There is no lock on my cubicle.
3. There is no lock on the computer’s power button.
4. The username and password are written on a note taped to the monitor, which I did not put there. The procedure for dialing out is sitting on a piece of paper right next to that.

And I was like, how exactly is leaving it on a threat, grumpy man?