Digital Diapers (a Short Story)

Too much computer technology is falling into the hands of too many hardheaded employees who personally refuse to know or learn anything about it. As an Information Technology Support person, you just want to keep the computers away from those individuals before they foolishly destroy their own information infrastructure. Unfortunately, most of these individuals have what's called power, or their sympathetic superiors have this power, and they want these computers they have absolutely no knowledge about, and they want them now.

One middle-aged executive said he wanted two new critical network fileservers. Then he changed his mind and said he needed only one, after the shipment had already arrived, been unpacked, and then fully assembled and connected to the network. Then he changed his mind again and said he needed five more, after the extra one had been repacked and shipped back. You should've seen the dirty looks on Procurement's faces. Now that this idiot executive has finally settled on three critical fileservers, I've finally been able to load the Operating System.

Now the Novell NetWare OS on our fileservers allows IT Support people like myself to set powerful security restrictions on user login accounts, restrictions that would prevent stupid users from doing stupid things, like deleting the core OS programs on the fileserver. And under normal circumstances, I get no opposition from anyone when it comes to setting such restrictions. But with this same boneheaded executive, there are no normal circumstances. A week after these critical fileservers are in place, the guy hires his nineteen-year-old deadbeat son, and then demands that I give this son's new login account unconditional access to all the fileservers and applications in the company, including the critical ones. Now this brat barely learned what a mouse was for, and once thought that a floppy was something on his grandma's chest. But you'd better believe he knows absolutely everything about Pot, Heroin, Acid, Cocaine, LSD, PCP, Magic Mushrooms, and let's not forget Crystal Meth. And if Daddy wants him to have access to everything, including our most critical applications and fileservers, then by golly he'd better get it, or there'd be hell to pay, and I'd have to pay it with the termination of my job. I'll never forget the day that little miscreant almost destroyed the entire corporate network by playing a bootlegged X-rated porno game on his office computer, a game that was infected with several lethal viruses known to attack Novell fileservers and network computers through unconditional-access login accounts like his. And every time I've tried to install Antivirus network-software, the same executive moron refuses, insisting that he knows all his important files would be mistaken for viruses, then deleted. (Of course, any IT Support person knows that's pure fiction, but try telling that to our executive friend.) Then he turns and blames me instead of his son, insisting that if I had done a better job, there would've been no virus outbreak in the first place.

Almost a week later, all the fileservers finally crashed. I come to find out that the cause of the crashes wasn't the executive, nor was it his son, but rather, his son's girlfriend, who was "desk-cleaning" for her boyfriend using his unconditional-access login account, and thought that it would help remove the clutter if she permanently deleted all the EXE and DLL and NLM programs that were taking up so much disk space in the Core System Areas of all the fileservers. (Remember those core OS programs I mentioned earlier?) Now I would've restored the fileservers from tape backups, but this same bimbo also thought that there were just too many labeled tapes cluttering up the locked cabinet, and so she unlocks the cabinet, takes all the labeled tapes, and throws them all out with the day's garbage pickup. (I keep saying the tapes were labeled, yes, labeled, because it's quite obvious that this airhead can't read worth squat.)

Well, to make a long story short, my job was terminated for what that executive creep called gross negligence on my part. Even after I was long gone, he threatened to press charges against me for the downtime and profit loss the corporation suffered, but he couldn't find anything to substantiate his claims. I didn't know whether to be upset for getting fired, or to be overjoyed. But I could rejoice in knowing that the soiled digital diapers worn by those users from hell would now have to be changed by someone else.


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