Work Gripes

Well, this is a first for me as a WFH employee. I was in the process of answering questions in a zoom meeting, and I had to go offline for a few minutes, because two fucking Jehovah's Witnesses decided to come down my driveway, and were standing at the front door while my dogs were going apeshit. The only positive was that in my clearly agitated mood, I explained that I was in the middle of a meeting, and after some small-talk about this newfangled society we live in, they handed me a brochure, helped me get the dogs back into the house, and left. Grrr.
 
For many years, I used my work laptop to keep a backup of my home stuff, like pictures and music. I would also take advantage of having MS Office, and use Word, Excel and PowerPoint for home stuff, like when we built the house. I used it for everything from designing the house, to storing all the loan docs, to tracking the building contract and keeping a photo/video archive of the project.

Sometime after the house was done, I thought it would be nice to transfer a copy of all the construction stuff that was on my work laptop to our home laptop. And that's when I discovered they had incorporated whole disk encryption; so anything you tried to get off the laptop via a device - such as a DVD drive or USB - would be rendered useless, as it would be converted to an encrypted file type. So all the construction stuff was stuck on my work laptop.

Then more recently, they went even further in restricting content transfer. They shut-off the Bluetooth file transfer, and they blocked any type of attachment or picture sending via email. Even using a non-company email program for sending files was blocked.

But suddenly they're no longer encrypting data sent to devices such as USB. So I was able to get my entire construction portfolio off the work computer. I'm happy about that, but the whole thing is a head-scratcher.
 
I learned my lesson when I got laid off in 2012.
I used my work laptop for a lot of personal stuff. (Nothing that embarrassing or inappropriate.)
I used my work email address for personal stuff and web-account log-ins, photo storage, and all kinds of stuff.

When I got laid off, I was able to save some of it, but I still run into accounts that use my old work email address that I can't change.
When I took my next job, I never mixed my work and personal emails, and was able to backup everything personal to a thumb drive.

My new office is crazy strict about computer use. If you plug in a thumb drive, IT sends a message that you have to justify why you're using it, or they lock you out.
One guy that left the company got in trouble for copying files. They had a full list of files, and even the serial numbers of the thumb drives.

I get why they do it, but it's still stupid and sucks.
 
My work laptop disables all usb and bluetooth connections. The only way to get stuff off of it is by e-mail which is of course monitored. Connections to personal e-mail type accounts are blocked.
 
We're not supposed to send ourselves email at home from the work account, but they don't give us a way to send ourselves our pay-stubs or expense reports and stuff. I email them to myself anyway. If they complain, I'll just tell them to get back to me when they solve that little riddle.

We can't install software either, but somehow I managed to install Firefox. I like it better than edge.
I'm scheduled to get a new laptop soon. I'm hoping I'll be able figure that one out again.
 
Here's an update. I talked to 2 people who both have privileged accounts with download capability; I've used both of them in the past to help me transfer work data. They both thought it was odd that I was able to do what I did. So now I'm going to let it be, and drop the whole topic. Just to reiterate, none of what I copied off the computer was work related, or labeled as such in any way.

As a side note, we are now required to put labeling on any new office documents we create. We can't save a new document without going through a 5-step labeling process. Once the documents are labeled, the company can easily track them, and control how they are moved. But the stuff I copied today was all created before 2018, with no labeling. Had I edited any of the documents, I would've had to label them.
 
HecticArt said:
We're not supposed to send ourselves email at home from the work account, but they don't give us a way to send ourselves our pay-stubs or expense reports and stuff. I email them to myself anyway. If they complain, I'll just tell them to get back to me when they solve that little riddle.

We can't install software either, but somehow I managed to install Firefox. I like it better than edge.
I'm scheduled to get a new laptop soon. I'm hoping I'll be able figure that one out again.
Click to expand...
We can email non-work accounts, but we get a big banner to read and acknowledge. And we can have Chrome installed.
 
scotchandcigar said:
Here's an update. I talked to 2 people who both have privileged accounts with download capability; I've used both of them in the past to help me transfer work data. They both thought it was odd that I was able to do what I did. So now I'm going to let it be, and drop the whole topic. Just to reiterate, none of what I copied off the computer was work related, or labeled as such in any way.

As a side note, we are now required to put labeling on any new office documents we create. We can't save a new document without going through a 5-step labeling process. Once the documents are labeled, the company can easily track them, and control how they are moved. But the stuff I copied today was all created before 2018, with no labeling. Had I edited any of the documents, I would've had to label them.
Click to expand...
We're supposed to label stuff, but they haven't cracked down on it yet.
I can see why it's important for some clients, but none of mine at this point.

I figure that they can see anything I do on my (their) laptop, and there isn't anything that I do that would be a problem for client confidentiality or handling company proprietary materials, so it's not a big deal. It's just a pain in the butt trying to get things done sometimes having to jump through the hoops.
 
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