The thing that struck me the most about the news--okay, okay...the thing that struck me after I stopped smirking over the completely unsurprising revelations about Josh Duggar, Jason Doré, and Ottawa, Ontario--was how many blithering, mouth-breathing, knuckle-dragging idiots used "real" email addresses to register an AM account. Like, email addresses that their spouses would recognise. Or, more stupefyingly, their work email addresses. Seriously, this is the level of stupid that warrants having one’s email privileges revoked. Possibly for life.
Attention, I/T Managers of the world: This is your moment.
Having clocked in two years of desktop support and babysitting servers, I feel your pain. And I was one of the lucky ones--we only had one virus on my watch, and that (mercifully) not even a Zero Day. But I've heard your war-stories. And I think we all intuitively recognise that the Ashley Madison species of idiot shares the majority of their DNA with the type of co-worker who's habitually guilty of:
- Installing malware (e.g. Napster, browser widgets, fake “virus scanners,” etc.) on their workstation #truestoryaboutnapsterbythebye
- Double-clicking any (and every) email attachment that lands in their Inbox
- Leaving files open (and thereby read-only to everyone else) on the shared drive
- Forwarding chain-email
- Adding misspelled words to the spell-check dictionary because they’re convinced that they’re right and Microsoft is wrong
- The Dreaded Reply-All ('Nuff said, amirite?)
- Font crimes (Again, ‘nuff said.)
- Being congenitally incapable of grokking the difference between CC: and BCC:
- Likewise, being congenitally incapable of printing double-sided copies of anything...or even switching their default printer during repairs
- Storing Every. Single. File. (and program shortcut) on the Windows desktop
- Using the same password for every system...and storing it on a Post-it taped to their monitor
- Insisting on access to systems/reports they never actually use
- Calling support because their workstation is "slow," only to have support arrive to find Facebook open and the browser scrollbar a millimetre tall
- Passive-aggressively weaponising the issue-tracking and/or project management system
I/T comrades, for the love of those of us who don't drag you away in the middle of critical system rebuilds (or at least playing FPSes for hours on end to, uh, "gather performance metrics" on said systems), get ye to the darkwebs! And bring thy RegExp A-game with thee! Scan those lists! I can (almost) guarantee that if you find your company domain(s) among them, the correlation between those AM sneaks and your laziest Luddites, your most slovenly sociopaths, your most vapidly venal office-critters will be statistically perfect.
In which case, you know what to do. Take screenshots. (Bonus points for correlating them with router logs.) Send them to every single printer in the building and "forget" to pick them up. Then wait for the radiation fallout to stop glowing, and you'll find that many of your work-day problems have taken care of themselves. And, more importantly, you will have done everyone who can be trusted with a computer a huge solid.
My I/T brothers and sisters, it's time to step up to the plate. This kind of opportunity doesn't surface often. Personal codes of ethics aside, I think we can all agree that using your work email account to cheat on your spouse or significant other shows a breathtaking lack of professionalism--quite apart from the sheer sleaziness of it all. Yeah, I don't want to work alongside that, either.
