The Burden of Information

Among the duties I perform at the office where I am employed, I serve as the ersatz computer technician and maintenance drudge. When there are software updates, I get called upon to make sure all the systems in the shop are loaded up with the latest and occasionally greatest programs. The same can be said for my relentless quest to keep all our virus and spyware protections up to date and functioning properly and mercilessly against the daily onslought we face.

I put a particular focus on the several computers within my immediate reach and check them almost daily. My newest office-mate, LucasFan, has inherited the computer left by the previous Elder-Statesman who occupied that seat. For some reason, and despite all the measures I use to innoculate it, it is more susceptible to viruses than Blubrik. Constant browser-hijack attempts and spyware installations keep me on my toes as well. I suspect that the Elder-Statesman had opened a door I just can't seem to shut back before Napster become synonymous with the promise of a police raid.

LucasFan is a devoted user of AOL Messenger and can be frequently found (to my employer's increasing chagrin) furtively tapping away details of his day and whatever other missives seem important to convey to his wife, who similarly keeps up a constant chatter in reply. As his most immediate superior (snicker), I've suggested that it's OK, provided it doesn't become a distraction to the tasks at hand. I'm hardly in a position to suppress his IM use, lest I put myself in a position of utter hypocrisy. My own contact list reads like a phone book, and for some of my friends - even local ones - it's my principal form of communication.

However, one very significant way in which we differ in our instant-messaging use, is that I never leave my conversations up on the screen for the world to see when I leave my desk - even for a minute. Every time I get up from my computer to refill my coffee cup or to equalize the coffee pressure on the other side of personal filtration system, I close all the open message windows. This serves to protect me from anyone's impression, however correct, that I spent too much time online, as well as protecting any information I may have sent or received from becoming immediately public. (Yes, I'm aware that my messages are most-likely being logged on some server somewhere - but those people don't much care about the pitiful details of my daily existence.)

My newest office-mate doesn't take such precautions. Frequently, when I need to access his computer directly in his absence, or during my usual morning viral spot-checks on all the computers in my office, there will be his AOL Messenger window, open wide and inviting, with the complete transcript of his daily chatter from the time he clocks in, until the moment he leaves for home. Initially, my reaction was a quick and mildly-disapproving clucking of my tongue followed by an immediate shutting down of the messenger window. His business is his business, and nobody needs to see it, myself included. I was protecting my fellow employee from his sloppy security practices.

Have you ever noticed how you can instantly pick out your own name out of a long blur of words? I have- and there in the middle of the computer screen one day recently, was mine. Curious, as any reasonable person might be, I quickly scanned the context of my reference and found myself suddenly unhappy about it. In fairness to LucasFan, they weren't his words that bothered me, but rather those of his wife, who reacted childishly and and jealously when she found out that a design idea that she really liked was not her husband's idea, but mine. Truly, in context, it's a small thing. In the comfortable context of presumed privacy we have all said things about other people that we would never utter in public, whether out of courtesy or fear of reprisal, and I recognize that this was most-likely the case in this situation. More recently, there have been other revelations about LucasFan's private life and troubles laid bare and splashed across the screen that have given me pause and evoked a sense of sympathy tempered by embarrassment on his behalf that he would leave such sensitive information literally plastered on the front of his monitor. While I may have proprietary notions about the computers on my desk, they aren't exclusively mine, and I'm aware that anyone in the shop may use them in my absence, and I theirs. That's how it's always been in the office, and it keeps secrets and innapropriate material to a minimum.

However, some secrets are better kept than spread, and I for one don't want the burden of someone else's personal information added to my baggage. I think I'll excercise my authority (snicker again) and have a little chat with him this morning about company policy and privacy rights.

Lest anyone get the impression that my office-mate is some sort of deviant or a member of a terrorist sleeper-cell based on the above post, nothing so interesting as that was made public on his computer screen. His disclosures were all benign, but personal in nature, and I prefer that they remain private and unknown, especially by me.