Derek Devicemanager✓

HR asked IT to work the company holiday party for free. We needed to set up microphones, projectors, a livestream, and the CEO's presentation. I asked about overtime. HR said the holiday party was a social event, not a work event. "Everyone is volunteering their time." I asked if attendance was optional. "No, it's mandatory." I asked if setting up equipment was optional. "No, IT needs to support the event." Interesting. So I showed up at 6 PM. No laptop. No cables. Just a plate of shrimp and a beer. At 6:15 the CEO's microphone stopped working. HR found me near the buffet. "Derek, we need you to fix the mic." I said I wasn't working. She said this was an emergency. I asked if emergencies counted as work. She said that's not what she meant. I asked if I was getting paid. She called my manager. My manager asked if HR had approved overtime. She said no. He said he'd see everyone Monday. At 6:23 PM, HR approved four hours of overtime for the entire IT team. We fixed the microphone in eleven seconds. The CEO thanked everyone for demonstrating our company's culture of going above and beyond. I went back for more shrimp. Apparently our culture costs time and a half.

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The new $18,000 coffee machine in our office requires employees to sign in with their work account. To get coffee. Security insisted on MFA because the machine stores employee preferences. So here's my morning now. Walk to kitchen. Select cappuccino. Enter corporate email. Enter password. Approve notification on phone. Select milk. Machine says: SESSION EXPIRED Start over. The CFO asked why coffee consumption dropped 70%. I explained that employees have started bringing instant coffee because nobody wants to complete a security challenge before caffeine. He asked if we could disable authentication. Security said no. "An attacker could access someone's beverage preferences." I asked what the worst-case scenario was. They said someone might order a drink using another employee's identity. I said that sounded like a coffee problem, not a cybersecurity incident. They escalated me to the CISO. Yesterday the CEO couldn't get his espresso because his phone was updating. He personally approved an authentication exception. Only for his account. So now the most powerful man in the company can get coffee without MFA. Everyone else needs to verify their identity to obtain 200ml of milk. Security says the system is working as intended. I have opened an investigation into whether the CEO's espresso constitutes privileged access abuse.

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Our CEO wanted to know why employees weren't using the $300,000 office renovation. So Facilities installed sensors under every desk to measure occupancy. Within a month, the executive floor had the lowest utilization in the building. 8%. The CEO demanded an explanation. Facilities said most executives spend their days traveling, meeting clients, or working from home. He said that was different. "Executive work isn't measured by physical presence." Interesting. Because last quarter, the same CEO told employees that physical presence was essential to productivity. Someone leaked the occupancy report. Now employees are asking why they're required to commute five days a week when the executive floor is essentially an abandoned luxury hotel. Leadership held an emergency meeting. They decided the solution was to exclude executive offices from occupancy reporting. Facilities asked IT to update the dashboard. I asked what we should call the excluded category. They suggested "Strategic Workspace." So now the dashboard shows: EMPLOYEE OCCUPANCY: 83% STRATEGIC WORKSPACE: N/A The CEO is delighted. Apparently working from home becomes strategy once your salary reaches a certain number.

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I discovered a former employee named Gary has been hosting a weekly meeting for the past six years. Gary retired in 2020. His recurring calendar invite never got canceled. Every Tuesday at 2 PM, 23 employees still have a meeting called "Weekly Alignment" on their calendars. Nobody attends. Nobody knows what it was originally about. I asked why they keep accepting it. Apparently everyone uses it to decline other meetings. It's a protected hour where nobody can bother them. HR found out and asked IT to remove it. I canceled the series. Within 20 minutes, 14 employees complained. One director said the meeting was essential to his team's productivity. I reminded him Gary has been retired for six years. He said Gary's absence wasn't relevant. By Thursday, three department heads had escalated the issue to my boss. Apparently removing a meeting that nobody attends has caused a measurable decline in employee satisfaction. We restored the meeting. Because Gary's account no longer exists, IT now owns the calendar invite. We're technically hosting a weekly meeting for 23 employees where the organizer is dead to the company and nobody shows up. HR wants to recognize Gary for his outstanding contribution to work-life balance.

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Our company hired an outside consultant to determine whether IT was overstaffed. First morning he asked me to connect his laptop to Wi-Fi. Then the VPN. Then his second monitor. At lunch he asked me how to convert a PDF to Word. By Wednesday he'd scheduled a daily 30-minute "technology alignment" meeting with me. On Friday he presented his findings to leadership. RECOMMENDATION: REDUCE IT HEADCOUNT BY 35%. I raised my hand. "Who will handle your technology alignment meetings?" He explained that those were essential consulting activities, not IT support. I asked Finance which department his 11 support requests had been billed to. IT. Apparently we're both overstaffed and personally responsible for keeping the guy recommending our layoffs productive. His final report also recommended creating one new position. A dedicated IT liaison for external consultants. He's billing us $400 an hour to invent a job for the person he's trying to fire.

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Security redesigned our guest Wi-Fi. Visitors must now authenticate using a company-managed account. I asked how someone who doesn't work here gets a company account. "Their host provisions a temporary identity." Fine. Tuesday we had six investors visiting. I created six temporary accounts. By 9:30 AM, all six had received: Mandatory cybersecurity training. An employee handbook. A calendar invitation to the quarterly all-hands. An email asking them to set their professional development goals. Apparently HR's onboarding system automatically picks up new company identities. I told HR. They said temporary accounts should be excluded. I asked them to exclude them. "That requires a change request." One investor completed the cybersecurity training because he thought it was required to access Wi-Fi. He scored 60%. HR emailed his sponsor recommending additional training. At 5 PM, the accounts expired. This triggered our automated employee offboarding workflow. All six investors received exit surveys. One was asked to return his company laptop. Another received an email asking why he had decided to leave the organization. Our CEO called me furious. "Why are investors being treated like employees?" I explained that Security requires guests to be employees before they're allowed to be guests. He's meeting with Security tomorrow. The investors have already been invited to their exit interviews.

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We launched an employee recognition platform where coworkers can award points for going above and beyond. Naturally, IT is getting destroyed. When the network works for 200 consecutive days, nobody says anything. When somebody's laptop dies and we fix it, they give us 50 points. Our senior network engineer has received zero points this quarter. Meanwhile, Brandon from Desktop Support has 2,400. I investigated. Brandon has been manually delivering replacement keyboard batteries to people's desks. He refuses to leave spare batteries in the supply cabinet. Says it "removes the human element from IT support." Every delivery earns him 50 points and a public thank-you. He's currently ranked #1 in the company. Last Friday the CEO recognized him at the all-hands for "consistently exceeding expectations." Brandon got a $1,000 bonus. My network engineer asked whether preventing problems counts as going above and beyond. HR said employees have to nominate him. Nobody knows his name because nothing he manages has ever broken. Brandon is now being considered for a leadership position. I ordered 500 dead batteries. Time to get promoted.

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Our office has been fighting over the temperature for three months. Sales wants 68°F. HR wants 73°F. The CFO wants 70°F. One VP keeps setting it to 65°F because he wears a three-piece suit in July. Facilities asked IT to investigate because the thermostats are connected to WiFi. I checked the building management system. Turns out the thermostats on the walls don't actually control anything. They're overridden by a central controller that keeps the entire floor at 72°F. They've been like that for four years. Every department has been adjusting a number on a screen and immediately feeling better. I told Facilities. They said: "Please don't tell anyone." Last week the CFO thanked me for finally fixing the temperature in his office. I haven't touched it. I just changed the display so it shows 70°F when he walks in. My most successful IT project this year is lying to a man about the weather inside a building.

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Legal decided every document containing company information needed a CONFIDENTIAL watermark. So we enabled automatic watermarking. Within 24 hours: Employee handbook: CONFIDENTIAL Cafeteria menu: CONFIDENTIAL Office map: CONFIDENTIAL Printer instructions: CONFIDENTIAL The fire evacuation plan hanging beside the elevators: CONFIDENTIAL Then Finance complained our invoice scanner couldn’t read invoices because CONFIDENTIAL was stamped diagonally across every total. Invoices got exempted. HR needed resumes exempted. Sales needed proposals exempted. Facilities needed floor plans exempted. By Friday the watermark policy had 47 exceptions. I asked Legal what documents were still being watermarked. They checked. Mostly Legal documents. Legal asked if they could also be exempted because the watermark “looks unprofessional when sent externally.” Approved. We now have a mandatory company-wide confidentiality watermark that appears on almost nothing. Except the cafeteria menu. Apparently lunch remains highly sensitive.

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Finance froze all laptop purchases for Q4. HR is still hiring. We have 23 new employees starting this month and 6 spare laptops. I asked Finance what they wanted me to do. “No capital purchases until January.” So Procurement found a workaround. Laptop rentals. Same model we normally buy for $1,050. Rental price: $210/month. Minimum term: 6 months. Total: $1,260. Finance approved 17 of them immediately. I asked why spending $1,260 was preferable to spending $1,050. “Rentals are operating expense. Purchases are capital expense.” Right. We are now paying $3,570 extra to avoid buying cheaper computers because the cheaper computers would appear in the wrong column. The CFO congratulated everyone for keeping Q4 capital spending under target. I congratulated him too. The laptops are identical. Only the accounting is more expensive.

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