• (cs) in reply to Patrick

    At my last job, every time they would call a meeting to lecture us about internet usage and remind us that they were monitoring it, I would spend every free moment looking for jobs on craigslist.

    But eventually, I could take it no longer, and I quit. Now I'm an IT manager with enough free time to also be an app developer. I am so much happier now!

  • (cs) in reply to rycamor
    rycamor:
    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."

    Nice story! Doesn't sound like concussions would hurt someone like that though.

  • (cs) in reply to Keith Brawner
    Keith Brawner:
    Spectre:
    Anon:
    Justice:
    RHuckster:
    Please please *PLEASE* don't bring up MFD. It brings back nightmares and it might prompt Alex to begin doing them again.

    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!

    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!

    I third this.

    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.

    Agreed It was using the comics template for comments that was the truly awesome part of MFD. I always made MFD my first stop on the intarwebs.

  • Wolfman (unregistered)

    That's why it's good to be the sysadmin of your tech company; and also know more about the system than the whole management team combined. ;) "Gee boss, I'm not sure why large swaths of browsing history from people i actually like has gone missing again. Maybe they are just being productive?"

  • (cs) in reply to Fred
    Fred:
    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!

    ...and those designers went on to write Lotus Notes.

  • Jaffa (unregistered) in reply to Vlad Patryshev
    Vlad Patryshev:
    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.
    Isn't this the C21 version of leaving your CV in the photocopier?
  • Jaffa (unregistered) in reply to Otherside
    Otherside:
    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
    Aye, same in the UK
  • (cs) in reply to Justice
    Justice:

    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!

    Sorry to comment on a week-old thread, but I agree wholeheartedly with the above - no comment on the quality of the original 'toons, but some of the responses were hilarious.

  • (cs) in reply to Otherside
    Otherside:
    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

    It's sort of similar here in the US: this is generally a clause to everybody's work agreement or contract (depending on if they're an employee or contractor.)

    Admittedly,

    1. it's not required - court precedent states that what happens on the company's computers belongs to the company, unless it is IP that is controlled by a contract that says otherwise.

    2. most employers do not monitor most traffic, and strive to keep from reminding any employees (apart from the ones who do the monitoring) that any traffic is actually monitored. Login messages still remind all employees that it can happen, however.

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