The treatise for the night: "what good are policies if no one follows them?" and "How childish can grown-ups be?". I have never seen a bigger circus at work, and the worst part is that I am in the middle of it. There are a couple of people that have access to the firewall. While this appears to be a good idea, it is not. Why? The human factor. When there are two paths to obtaining a goal, a manipulative human will always choose the path of least resistance. In this case I have a user (who happens to be a manager of another group) who was requesting elevated privileges as a VPN user. He didn't ask me to do it, why? I would have turned him down. Instead, he went to one of the less surly firewall administrators and asked for the favor. Those of you in the security field know, there are no such things as favors. I (fortunately) happened to be logged into the firewall console (one at a time thank you very much) when the other administrator tried to complete the _favor_. Naturally she sent me an email asking if I would log out so that she could get in. She also attached the original email to her request for me. So I found the information she needed and sent it to her. She then replied, asking if I would add The Manager to X_VPN_GROUP that has higher privileges. I replied to her explaining that in the event that a user's privileges are being elevated, I would need the request to be authorized according to the policy in place at the institution. This apparently didn't go over well with _The_Manager_ because he emailed my manager my response to the request -- getting a bit of a chuckle I might add -- as if I hadn't done my job right. All was fine and good, until _THE_MANAGER_ had me booted from the firewall console. That was abruptly at five o'clock, I decided to deal with the new twist tomorrow. Things could get ugly from here. Especially since the deadline for the firewall migration I'm working on is rushing forward, and I no longer have access to the current firewall.
As I look around, I don't think I have ever seen so many people trapped in Maya in one place at one time. It is absolutely amazing. Monkeys, zombies, and little minded people getting off on the crack of small-town-politics all in one _small_ corporate environment in the middle of no-where Oklahoma, USA.
Plans for the Evening: Work on my current academic paper so I get the fcUk out of the plains, the people here are freaking retards like this.
Music for the Evening: A Rush of Blood to the Head, Coldplay
