It went longer than it should be. I had to spend practically the whole day filing a BAF that nobody seemed to have the comprehensive information on. Only to find out at the last hour or two that there is no need for it. By then some of the signatories for my clearance have already left so there’s still the that to finish up. But finally, no more CQ, PPM, and other hideously ugly, overly expensive commercial software tools. Hello to free and open source. And maybe even to some pretty but inexpensive commercial software. Whee!!!
Loss of Identity
Loss of identity cards, that is. Last weekend. I lost my company issued ID cards. This made it NOT easy for me to get in and out of the office building so every day for the past week, I’ve been leaving my driver’s license with the security guard in exchange for a visitor’s pass. Unfortunately, today, on the last working day of the week, the guard apparently gave my license to another driver who was exiting the building. Neither he nor the other driver verified whether the ID returned was the right one. Losing three IDs in a span of one week! What are the odds of that? So anyway, they said they’ll get it back from the other driver. I sure hope they do.
UPDATE: Guess what?!? My mom-in-law found my company IDs!
UPDATE 12/12/12: The other driver finally visited the building and returned my driver’s license. All is well!
‘Tis The Season To Be Sick
Just got back from a 3-day leave of absence due to illness. It’s that time of the year when the latest flavor of the bug makes its rounds. I usually catch it every year and get downed for 3-4 days. But now I’m back to work. And although I’m still coughing, it’s not significantly worse than some of the other folks around. So where did I most likely get it? From work, of course. The sick leave mechanism discourages people from staying home until they’re completely well and not spread the bug. Me included now. Heh.
Mailbox Full
The CEO(?!?) at work wrote an email memo on the “pervasive recipient’s mailbox is full” failure message. It reminds me of around 5 years ago when I had a conversation with my boss on mail storage limits. And he asked why we are wrangling over mail storage limits when GMail can offer practically unlimited 4GB (at that time) mail storage capacity.
The answer back then is budgetary and technology constraints. We initially didn’t have the budget for the storage servers that can accommodate both the company’s file storage and mail storage requirements. The generally available hard drives back then tops off at 500GB. We eventually worked up our storage limits but it still fell short of GMail.
Today, the situation is different. The company is a big and well-funded multinational and storage technology has leapt. 1.5TB drives go for around P6,000 these days. GMail capacity is now 10GB. For 1000 users, that is just 10TB. Even if you factor in back-up and redundancy, even if you factor in the storage infrastructure, it still comes in relatively cheap. So how come mail storage limits are still so low? Maybe we should just use GMail.
Work-Life Balance
We had a town hall meeting at work today. The CEO went through the usual stuff: future plans, operations, logistics, financials, and human resources. During the course of the discussion on human resources, the staff attrition rate was discussed. One factor identified for the high attrition was excessive work hours. He emphasized that they are aware of the issue and declared that everyone should go home on time. Normally, I would wave that off as management rhetoric. But I know for a fact that the policy is being actually put into practice. In fact, I always had a hard time justifying overtime. So here’s management that not only preaches but also practices work-life balance. Meanwhile, the staff can go home instead of rendering extra hours to make up or cover up for the mistakes of others and/or mismanagement. That’s refreshing.