The trouble with locks...

[ulnagar.livejournal.com]

This post reminded me of my own experiences with someone's grand idea of preventing theft.

I work for a tertiary education institute, spread out over nearly half the state. Our classrooms are maintained by us, but are actually the property of the relevent campus. Some of the campuses thought to put in place security measures to prevent theft of equipment. That in itself isn't neccessarily a bad idea, but what they chose just makes my head spin.

It's called a "lock-down pad", and that is basically what it is. Two metal plates, with interlocking channels. The channels hold rods which are then locked in place on the outer plate with a key. The bottom plate is secured to the underside of the computer, while the bottom plate is secured to the desk. I have no idea what they used to "secure" the plates to the desk, but short of absolutely demolishing the desks, they will not come off. The plates also have a loop for a notebook-style cable lock so you can secure the monitor as well.

Because the classrooms are "owned" by the campuses, they keep the keys for these "lock-down pads". With up to 4 years in the rotation cycle of computers, they don't need to pull out the keys very often. In fact, when I came to replace 3 classrooms of computers (16 computers per classroom), they had no idea where the keys where, or where they could find them.

What makes it even scarier is that each pad has two locks, and different keys. We had to try and find ninety-six different keys and match them to the locks they went with. In the end, we still had a number of locks that we couldn't get off and had to physically drill through them to remove them.

Needless to say, when I replaced the computers, I did not lock them down again. However, since it's just about physically impossible to remove the pads from the desk without destroying it, the computers still sit on top of the pads.

Oh, and did I mention that the positioned the pads too far back on the desk to be able to actually reach behind and connect any cables? If you're ethernet cable fell out, you'd have to get a very small child with very small hands in there to reconnect it.

*brain explodes*

We have IT, so we don't need to think

[thewrabbit.livejournal.com]

It's a public holiday, but I'm working - as tech support we need to be available for our wonderful customers.

It's 8.30 a.m. and I'm leaving the house, grab my phone and notice a missed call on my work line - it's customer X.

Voicemail has been left, and he's left a message at 8:10a.m. saying he's got a problem with his computer but he wasn't sure if we were open that day because it was a holiday.  Could I call him back urgently.

Now that's bad enough - if I am working he could have waited till 9a.m. and phoned the office first.  If I am off, you can imagine how thrilled I would have been to be woken by my phone ringing.

Reach the office, and give him a call.  He's at home and trying to pay the staff wages, via a dial up connection to the bank.  He can't get connected, he thinks he's maybe unplugged something because he's had builders in.  Now this is at his home, he also has a PC in his office that's capable of doing this - but his office is 45 minutes away.  So he'd rather risk disturbing me on a day off than drive to his office - because it's a holiday.  At this point I'm counting to 100.

OK basic diagnostics first, let's make sure everything is plugged in where it should be.

Modem cable in back of PC - check
Other end of modem cable plugged in to wall - check
Reboot PC - check
Normal phone plugged in to line, any dial tone - nothing.

You can almost see the light bulb go on in his head at this point.  He now mentions that because of the building work there had been a wire hanging loose over his study door.  And it had been annoying him.  At this point you have the following options:
a)  Pin it up in some way
b)  Ignore it until the builders are back
c)  Cut it

Guess which option he took; if only it had been mains power.