Gutting It Out

Been a long week.  But it's over.  

We've been working in a new-to-us system this week.  Previously we used one system to find out what work needed to be done, it was done in another system, where we had a third we had to look to for documents that might not have been attached to the first system, and then there's the inevitable part of the job where we ask for approval of our request, which some insurance companies provide through a phone call, some use faxing back and forth, and some have their own web sites that you submit your request to and receive your approval.

Before you snort too much about the faxing, it's secure.  I cannot email requests because of the design of the email system.

Back in 1998, I was working as the IT guy for a medium-sized company.  We were privately owned, so we didn't show up on any sort of list, including Fortune.  We were a fairly hot company on some lists, so we kept growing.  But that also made us a target and ... well, I had been informed that our new system which I'd requested and installed was, some people told me, going to make it a lot easier for people to ...  get away with things they would prefer they didn't do.

I'm not going to go all spy-universe on you, or get lost in the cyber-crime world.  The bottom line is that, when it comes to certain fields, a competitor can make a lot of good guesses at what you're doing by certain bits of information.  And since I do not understand all of it myself, I do know that I can tell when there's something going somewhere where something should not be going.  

So yeah.  And before you scream at me that I was spying on things that I had no right to look at, siddown and shaddup.  A corporate email system is owned by your employer.  They are paying for your time, for the computer on your desk, for the electricity, the computer network that connects the computers of all of your co-workers, and the internet connection that you use to surf pet porn or whatever else it is that you do when you are on "break" or whatever else it is you call it when you're not actually working.

Or maybe I should just deliver the verbiage which I did at the beginning of every single corporate training session I gave my fellow employees.  "Before you log in, I do need to tell you that once you log into the computer, you have absolutely no expectation of privacy.  Our corporate email system is not encrypted, your messages are sent through the internet in a way that makes certain that the message can be clearly transmitted and confirmed.  So I would not be sending any passwords, or any secrets that you don't want the neighborhood twelve year old to learn if your kid lets them into your office to use your home computer to download anything you don't  want them to see.  If I am asked by management to scan your computer system, I will have to do it and I may have to do it without telling you it has been done.  So please, I am asking, do not do anything with your email account that you wouldn't want me to learn about, wouldn't want to see disclosed in any sort of corporate legal filings, or anything you wouldn't want your neighbor to learn about you on the 10 pm news."  

I know, kind of blunt, but the true bottom line is that I could read every single in-bound or out-bound email.  I do not give a frozen turd what it is you're planning on doing with your significant other after dinner.  I will be up on my toes, however, if I see any sort of business document being sent from your email address to an email address that happens to belong to one of our biggest competitors.  And if you're at all interested, yes, that's how I ended up having to let human resources know what was going on, which led to a person's termination.

No, I am not proud of it, but the bottom line was that the individual in question was sending specific information about our overall corporate planning for a seasonal event that had rather large impact on our entire year for many hundreds of members of our organization, and if that information was acted upon, it could destroy the business.  And yes, I've scrubbed a hell of a lot of details off this so that you can pretty much make it fit any sort of situation, which is exactly what I intend, because the person who ended up losing their job was someone I liked.  And thought was far smarter than they turned out to be.  

And the really sad part is that they thought their willingness to openly share information which they were not supposed to share would get them a leg up on getting a job in the organization they shared the information with.  Funny thing, there, is that if you are willing to rat out your current employer to a prospective employer, other employers, including those whom you rat to, are likely to consider the possibility that, having done it once, would you do it again?  

And yeah.

But anyway, getting back to my current job, I can't email unencrypted documents like medical documents to other organizations because anyone could read that stuff, and there's this little thing that pretty much requires me to not do that.  It's called HIPAA, and is likely to put me in jail if I ever do anything that stupid.  And by damn, that's exactly where I belong if I'm that dumb.  

Which, fortunately, Mrs. Dominik's only boy ain't.  

But getting back to the point, we consolidated all of those systems into one somewhat off-the-shelf tool that is fairly widely used elsewhere - which means the thing is pretty well debugged.  And while it's not custom off the shelf stuff, it's extremely flexible and powerful and does all right.  But the trick is converting a process that I know how to do from the old systems into the new one.  Because there's a damned lot of detail that goes into medical records and doing what it is I do that has to be exactly right.  I mean, if I make a mistake in what it is I do, I will not kill anyone.  I might make it so that my employer does not get paid what they need to get paid to provide a service, which is exactly and specifically what I do not want to do.  It's my job to put my employer in the best possible place to get paid what the contract says they should be paid for providing a service to you.  

And that means we can keep taking care of people.  Which is what I like to be able to do.  So I try to do the best job I can do to get it done properly.    And today I learned that I know a little bit more than I thought I did, and I got to explain what I do to some people who do not understand how it is I can do what I do.  My employer considers me a "subject matter expert" on some stuff that is, honestly, stuff I never wanted to be an expert on, but now that I am, I am very grateful that I could do that, and that I can provide that knowledge and experience to make other people around me better.  

Because that's also in my job description.  So that helps.  

And yeah, it can be exhausting at times.  But that's the way it is, I guess.  So at the very least I have a job that regularly challenges and pushes me to do what it is I need to do to make things better for some folks.  So there's my day in a nutshell.  Absolutely appropriate container.