Snow day? Not so much

[jducoeur]

The news says that Billerica has 17.5 inches, and Woburn has 18.5. Burlington is about halfway in between, so I guess I know how much snow we have. The plowing service is on probation and I think they know it; we'll see if the driveway is properly plowed tonight.

Of course, Memento has lots of people who work remotely anyway, so the company scarcely even blinked: the message from HR wasn't so much "The office is closed" as "The roads are bad, so we encourage you to work from home". Since most people work from home frequently anyway, that's fairly straightforward. (I'm pleased to see that our new VPN seems to be holding up.)

The amusement of the day was the monthly Sprint Review meeting. Our two Product Managers live in Atlanta and Phoenix, so they usually phone in to these things, while the rest of us gather in a meeting room. This time, they decided to come to the meetings this week in person, so they are staying at the hotel near the office. The result? They were the only ones in the meeting room, while the rest of us stayed home and *we* phoned into it. Clearly, there is a karmic conspiracy against the entire project ever being in the same room at once...

Comments

[dsrtao]

Yesterday I met the IT guy of the business across the hall from us. We were in the elevator going home. He groused about how none of his Ph.D financial types could figure out the VOIP system or the VPN. I commiserated without boasting much about how we have everything set.

It turns out we only had problems with our new guy, who has some special factors going on.
- He's sales
+ He has a Mac
- He doesn't know what the Terminal app is

Eh, we'll work it out.

[goldsquare.livejournal.com]

New guy is new. :-)

I hope you don't have to do what one of the great IT guys I worked with some years ago had to do: remind people that, while on the VPN, all network traffic is going through corporate servers: including material that is neither work related nor work appropriate.

While he was "scolding" everyone, he told me privately as a laugh that it was the CEO that was watching porn, which set of the baby-minders that the CEO insisted we install to make sure the employees weren't being bad. :-)

[dsrtao]

I won't have to do that. I give everybody a lecture when they are hired and as a reminder once a year. It distills to:

1. Don't embarass the company.
2. Don't embarass me.
3. Don't embarass yourself.