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Admin
I once had a Trash-80 computer. But Trash-11? That's even before my time.
Admin
I'm imagining Mr. Magenta (from MFD - speaking of which, aren't we due for Season 3 of that?) as "The President":
Magenta: Mwa-ha-ha nobody will suspect this TRASH11 folder is secretly recording all of their email conversations!
Admin
Please please PLEASE don't bring up MFD. It brings back nightmares and it might prompt Alex to begin doing them again.
Admin
Since this is a classic WTF from 2007, I'm curious to know what happened to the company in the story. I can't imagine a company would remain all that successful with a nutjob president working full-time monitoring every employee's email.
Admin
Wow... theres some thing to be said about monitoring email... but really? What do you gain...
Captcha: ullamcorper
Admin
MFD itself may have been pretty terrible (though it got way better in the second season), but the comments were the best content this site has ever seen.
Bring back MFD!
Admin
Admin
One can only hope Oracle bought them.
Admin
Seconded! Bring back MFD! When TDWFT was running MFD, it was the first site I'd check in the morning and I'd check back multiple times during the day (to see the new comments). Since they got rid of it, TDWFT has dropped to about 5th or 6th on my list with revisits much less likely.
I think they stopped in out of genuinely hurt feelings because their comic sucked and everybody said so, but the comments were absolutely hilarious. Come on TDWFT, swallow your pride and let us make fun of your ham-fisted drawings again!
Admin
A loss of employees. I worked at a company that monitored instant messages, e-mails, and browsing history. Two of my co-workers were written up for passing a quick joke over IM. I wasn't warned specifically, but generally, that encrypting IM messages was "ba-ad". Fortunately, I got a smart-phone shortly thereafter and I could be a content employee again, able to send a message or two to the wife when needed and without fear of snooping by the big boss.
My immediate manager was very sad to see me go, I was sad to leave them in the situation I did (I enjoyed the work and my co-workers). But I'm still recovering from that job and realizing it can be fun to go to work and to be pleased with my surroundings.
Admin
I third this.
Admin
I wouldn't wish that on my worst enemy.
Admin
After that last email, everyone should have started emailing each other about how stupid and disrespectful the president was. And start discussions about leaving if it doesn't stop.
Admin
That would probably have the opposite effect...
Magenta: What?! The peons are talking bad about me?! And threatening to leave?!?! Inconceivable! Jenkins, lock the doors. And double the workload. I will NOT have my EMPLOYEES speak to me that way.
Any "President" paranoid enough to snoop on everybody would turn into a tyrant if people were deliberately talking badly about him; after all HE can't be the problem, he's THE BOSS.
Admin
Admin
I think it was PDP-11.
Admin
Fourth'd - the comics sucked, but the comments were among the most hilarious things on the internets. I even contributed once and got a sticker. I pine for the golden days of TDWTF/MFD.
Admin
By the way I loved my Trash-80. And by love, of course, I mean I wanted to empty a magazine into whoever wrote the software...
There was a word processing program that silently and automatically saved each page of your document to a separate file... on your 8 inch floppy disk. That got interesting when you tried to insert a paragraph in the middle of page one, because the paragraph formerly known as the bottom of page one had to be deleted (disk seek, disk seek...) then inserted at the top of page two (disk seek, disk seek...) pushing some text off the bottom of page two (disk seek, disk seek...) and I think you can see where this is going. But the designers couldn't.
Anyway the really charming feature (and by charming I mean... oh, never mind) was that page five automatically and silently overwrote page one!
Admin
there's an easy solution here. all the people who know about this subscribe themselves to multiple email lists and then make rules to file them straight into the trash. when the noise level gets too high snooping becomes a time waster
Admin
I took a contract with a guy whose 'company' had every single email 'address' routed to a single mailbox. Emails were printed out, skimmed by the head guy then passed out to the addressee on hardcopy. Replies emanated from a single PC and likewise were printed and read.
He's still around. He has one longterm partner, a dozen or so interns whom he works like dogs, and a succession of contractors who turn over fast. When he terminated my contract, I took a look at that single outbox. The new contract was for $5 more than mine -- with the proviso that hours beyond forty each week be unpaid 'training'.
Interestingly, our most recent hire was one of these contractors for the requisite few weeks. Like me, she doesn't appear to miss working for Sunny even a little bit. But who would?
Admin
Just use a webmail service like gmail and avoid the company email servers like the plague. Then setup a box with a java program that periodically sends emails of how great the boss is and also the occasional random and fake bug report. Problem solved. The President still thinks hes "monitoring" emails and everyone can go about their work day unhindered.
Admin
Admin
Ummm.... Why did you delete my last comment? And the one inquiring about the deletion?
Admin
But...we....likes....the evil stuff! We need the evil as a jumping off point. Mr Magenta would agree.
Admin
Admin
Lather, rinse, repeat.
Admin
I have a confession to make. I did exploit this system once. When I heard from a coworker (whose name I'll omit) that at Borland they are reading all our emails, I decided to use it. Created a yahoo account under an imaginary Russian name, and sent an email to myself, inviting myself to a nice startup to a good position of senior architect or something, with options, etc. And responded it, saying that, oh, sorry man, I love my job here so much; the only problem is my salary... My salary was raised by 20k two weeks later. That's after a couple of years of my fruitless whining.
Admin
This comment has been deleted before being read.
Admin
Monitor emails. LIKE A BOSS TRASH11. LIKE A BOSS Email Receipts. LIKE A BOSS
Admin
Admin
20K Rubles?
Admin
Another vote for the return of MFD. I just don't have time for fun unless it's mandated. :(
Admin
"discreetly" is not the same as "discretely". Lrn2dictionaryOK.
Yrs, Pedantic
Admin
Admin
I find it strange that nobody brought up the aspect of privacy. Here in Belgium it is illegal to read emails or look at browsing history from an employee without their knowledge. If the company would want to do that kind of monitoring they would have to announce it and add a clause to everybody's contract
Admin
I saw a group faced with a similarly paranoid figurehead once and their collective response was to enact plans they had been discussing only in theory.
A significant group of them turned in resignations - all in the same envelope - indicating that they could not work for someone who would tell such an obvious and known falsehood. The went out and started their own, competing company and took a chunk of the book of business with them.
Admin
Fifth'd! Opening up paint.net and taking the weewee out of a shoddy unfunny comic and enjoying the other awesome entries was the best thing about the site. Plus it gave me something to do at work before lunch.
Admin
If the president really doesn't want to miss out on any offers for increasing "his size", then surely this is the only logical course of action.
Admin
Presumably the story comes from the US, where in most states employers are free to abuse the privacy and dignity of their employees and the employees are at-will. "At-will" meaning "we can fire you at any time for any reason and unless you can prove we've done it in a way that discriminates against a federally-protected class, you can fuck off." This system also has the advantage in that good employees are welcome to leave the company to get better jobs or become contractors/consultants, and poor employees or those constrained by outside circumstances stay behind and provide fodder for this site. Win-win.
Admin
Oh wow! that just have to be the record for evil behavior!! Pitr would be proud :-)
Yours Yazeran
Plan: To go to Mars one day with a hammer
Admin
I also loved the comments to MFD. What's not to love about a crowd-sourced comic strip?
Admin
If you learn that someone is snooping on you and they don't know you know, there are many ways to turn the tables on them. The movie The Rainmaker had an amusing example.
Admin
Exactly. I always assume that my employer (in the U.S.) is reading my emails and monitoring my browsing history on any machine owned by the company. At a .com business there are usually a web analytics team devoted to monitoring users who come to our site. It would be trivial for them to monitor and analyze employee web activity. However, my guess is nobody cares what you do as long as you aren't causing any problems.
Admin
Bring back MFD, so that hate can be tunneled! Instead of fighting with each other, we could laugh at the strips, using nothing but sarcasm and wit. We felt catharsis when we could mentally spit at them. Throw stones of sarcasm and rocks of wit at them. Wait a minute... Bring back stoning! Stoning rocks!
[A bass-boosted "Welcome to the jungle" playing loudly off screen] HORATIO:
Admin
I remember the contests about writing a best dialogue for each strip. I won the "best" dialog ("less worse" would be better, IMHO), but never received anything for it. I DEMAND A MEDAL, DAMMIT!
Admin
Admin
FTFY.
Admin
FTFY
Admin
Admin
At my second web startup job, back in 2000, the president once decided he was going to read everyone's mail. Unfortunately, he had also decided that his email client would have an autoresponder exclaiming about how wonderful our (unreleased) product was, and how you should expect regular updates as to its progress.
Well, he happened to decide this on the evening after I signed up to the main PHP users' mailing list. The next morning at work I received a flood of angry emails from PHP users (and PHP core team members) about how I was spamming the system, and finally a mail from Rasmus Lerdorf himself telling me I had been blocked. It took me a few minutes to figure out that the boss had of course received several hundred emails from the list and his client had responded to every participant multiple times. GAHHH!! Talk about major nerd embarrassment...
Fortunately I managed to get the boss to cease this behavior, even though he couldn't understand what everyone was so upset about. Then I emailed Rasmus explaining the situation and begging to be allowed back on the list. He consented, with the proviso that I "knock the moron on the head once more, for me."