Category: Internships

I feel like getting arrested

September 3, 2004 /

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?

August 5, 2004 /

Pretty much everybody I talk to at my job works practically next to me, in development or QA. The bad part is that never talking to end users or customers means I don’t have any wacky Stupid, Stupid End-User stories to tell on my internet journal (like everybody else with an internet journal). The good part… well, that’s pretty much self-evident.

This is actually a different lady in a different next cube

July 15, 2004 /

Nobody’s working very hard today, because our team supervisor is on vacation (this also makes it unofficial Casual Day, so my shirt is untucked–party!). I actually am working, but only because I’ve been a slacker most of the week so far; several of my co-workers are having a conversation about food, one cube over. I just overheard this:

Coworker 1: I’ve eaten lots of things, I’ve eaten sheep–

Coworker 2: Oh, well that’s normal…

Coworker 1: –intestines.

Then I burst out laughing, which totally blew my cover.

June 29, 2004 /

As of this week I’m doing major, whole-process Quality Assurance at work. I’m doing fine so far, although there’s a lot of work to do; I’m also getting paid, oh, probably a third of what the other people in QA make. I’ve never received a raise since I started here as a flunky last summer, even though back then my job was “generate simple reports in Access” and now it’s “fix real bugs and test entire processes.” When I get all this testing done–hopefully by next Monday–I’m going to ask for one.

June 29, 2004 /

Says the nonexistent scuttlebutt: Lady In The Next Cube still exists and works here, just on a different floor. That’s nice.

June 22, 2004 /

The Lady in the Next Cube is gone, either fired or transferred. Her place has been cleared out except for an empty datebook and an old McDonald’s toy (one of hundreds she used to have). It’s a sad day. I knew her name, but I’m not sure she ever knew mine.

June 17, 2004 /

I went to look out the window in the empty office next to my cube, and in the parking lot below I could make out two women. They were talking to each other, and walking, in unison, backwards. They did this for at least fifty feet.

They continued walking and went behind and under a tree, and out of my field of view. When they re-emerged, they were walking forward again, still talking.

I’d write a story about that, if I could think of any justification for it at all.

June 4, 2004 /

After about a year, it finally occurred to me that I work in a cubicle, a space that is in its very nature designed to be modular. I’ve never really liked the way things were arranged in here. Today, I did something about it.

After about an hour of work, some sweat and some very odd looks, my forty-two square feet of space are now much more accommodating. I moved a big cabinet and some shelves I never used into an empty cube nearby, and wiped away a lot of accumulated dust. It feels bigger and lighter, and my workstation is finally in such a position that nobody can sneak up on me while I’m sitting at it. Or walk by and notice that I’m typing in my online journal instead of working. The downside to this is that I may occasionally have to make eye contact with the humans now, but this is a small price to pay.

I can actually use my whiteboard now. I’ve never decorated the walls of this place in any way, as my little symbolic refusal to be a cube-drone; I still don’t know if I will. But this does feel a little more like my own place now.

Inertia is a strange thing. I feel like I just built a house.