July 17, 2020
Dear Everyone:
Nearly everywhere I go these days, which admittedly is not much—grocery
store, pharmacy, office supply store, my favorite restaurant For Take
Out Only—all have clear plastic partitions hastily erected between the
customer and the cashier.
This is to protect “essential” workers from the general, germ-laden
public.
What I have noticed is how quickly the clear plastic partitions have
been conscripted into bearing temporary notices addressed to the public,
and useful notes for the cashiers.
The other day I watched a cashier calmly peeling the product code
labels off some fruits and placing the labels on her side of the clear
plastic partition. Pretty
soon the cashiers and customers won’t be able to see each other for all
the temporary information ensconced upon the clear plastic partitions.
It reminds me of the “Good Old Days” when we had large cathode ray tube
(CRT) monitors at work, and handy keyboard shelves positioned under the
desk. The ergonomic experts
proclaimed that all “data entry” employees, i.e., everyone who regularly
used a computer, should use a document holder when entering information
into the computer.
The idea was to avoid the hunched-shoulder posture that came from trying
to read a document laid flat on the desk while typing.
Some enterprising company came up with a document holder that sat
on the edge of the desk in front of the monitor.
It was made with clear plastic, so that the user could readily
see the monitor while simultaneously reading the document held in place
against the plastic. Our
company happily provided these document holders for any employee who
wanted one, or whose supervisor decided the employee “wanted” one.
In no time, people began to use the clear plastic to hold various notes,
photos, and other things.
The temporary adhesive on some note pads made this especially easy.
I remember one former co-worker in particular.
Her document holder was so covered in temporary notes that very
little of the clear plastic appeared anywhere.
She would even write her latest password on a sheet of note
paper, stick it to the plastic, then, for added insurance, attach
regular adhesive tape over the edges to keep the paper from possibly
blowing away.
And, just in case, she would write the password on another piece of
paper and tape it to the back of her security badge.
The company required that all employees change their password at
regular intervals. No
problem. She would tape the
new password directly over the old one.
In those days, passwords were required to be eight characters long, and
couldn’t be reused. Her last
name was six letters, so you can guess what her password was.
Right.
“XXXXXX01…02…03, and so on.
All she really needed to remember was what she had changed the last two
digits to.
But then, the company’s security system caught on and would not allow
passwords that only changed the last few characters.
Apparently, she was not the only person to come up with this
dodge.
Hence the need to post each new password to the document holder.
Of course, if someone managed to break into the facility, then
find her specific computer, and know her login identifier, they would
still have to figure out which of dozens of bits of paper with critical
information on them contained the latest password.
Needless to say, it never happened.
But, the security people insisted, it could have.
Love, as always,
Pete
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