Most of my workday was spent setting up my already-customized new workstation. That's actually an improvement over the nearly two-day process it used to be. (Our resident Sys. Admin. at least tailors the software montage to our jobs, rather than merely handing off whatever McImage is cut by corporate I/T.) Much of the time saved comes from the fact that SysAdmin just hooks our soon-to-be-former workstation up to the network and maps a drive to it on the new workstation. That allows for what I call the "one-step-schlep." (In the old days--a.k.a. 2007--we had to drag our data to a network share and hope we remembered everything the first time.)
I'm not complaining, but I couldn't help but notice how, no matter what kind of files my mouse hauled from the Windows XP to the Windows 7 installation, the latter went into over-protective parent mode. As in, Oh-I-don't-know-honey-are-you-sure-you-feel-comfortable-doing-this-how-much-do-you-really-know-about-that-file-I-mean-you-don't-even-know-anything-about-its-parent-folder-and-that-extension-could-just-be-all-an-act-and-yes-I-know-it's-your-hard-drive-and-all-but-I-just-don't-want-to-see-you-with-a-virus-when-a-little-caution-now-could-prevent-that.
Yeeesh.
The bottom line is, there is zero--on second thought, let's make that negative--credibility in such "warnings." At that point, it's not even security kabuki as practiced by the DHS/TSA. Rather, it rolls on the same level as the ravings of a tin-foil-suited nutjob living in a bomb shelter insulated with bulging Dinty Moore cans. And, given that my firm paid a premium for the soi-dissant "Enterprise" version of that operating system, you'd better believe I think we have the right to expect better than that.
Fortunately for what I was trying to accomplish, overriding the hand-wringing freakout was a matter of a simple--albeit time-wasting--click. But the bottom line is that paranoia and fear-mongering do not make us secure. That goes for our desktops just as much as airport rigamarole. Sadly, real life doesn't have the same happy ending as the fairy tale: Those who cry "Wolf!" are too often rewarded with power and money, rather than removed from the organizational gene-pool.
