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"Oh shit, my career " shouted one of the interns

“Oh shit, my career!” shouted one of the interns in the bullpen when it becomes obvious immediately what had happened. Yes, Justin. You had now learned a new and uncomfortable truth about working for the Man, and your working life will never be the same again. And it all started because he didn’t follow the mandatory security training that every employee needs to click through while half-paying attention. Yes indeed. In a past life, I was an information-technology security specialist. For those of you in the back who have led worthwhile existences, these words may not make sense to you. Others are not so lucky, and at this moment are rolling their eyes, or looking for the closest exits. We are, or were, the folks who force you to use a password that isn’t “password,” and stop sending emails containing the company’s bank information to Inner Somalia. Being in information security is a lot like being a regular old computer nerd, except you’re also incredibly paranoid. Imagine you live in a house full of vicious, murderous ghosts that only you can see, and all your family members keep doing horror movie cliche shit like leaving the doors open, shaking genie lamps they find in the parking lot, and reciting “Bloody Mary” three times into a bathroom mirror. You gotta keep them safe, which slowly drives you insane over the course of, oh, about your first six weeks of employment. After that, you’ve basically just given up and are like the hardened firefighters who respond to grisly highway accidents with an encyclopedic knowledge of what kind of solvent cleans what kind of human fluid off the roadway. Back to Justin: part of our paranoia involved doing elaborate role-playing exercises. Some of our nerds would pretend to be a different kind of nerd, and try to talk themselves into places they didn’t belong. The idea is that a horrible criminal or cyberterrorist could also use this rarefied power (“Hi, I’m the guy who is supposed to fix the servers. They’re not serving. Please show me where the servers are, and leave me alone with them for several hours”) and we needed to figure out who was dumb enough to fall for it. Justin was dumb enough to fall for it. If only he had paid attention to the mandatory security quiz that we made him click through, this all could have been avoided. Everything ended up well for him, though. The whole experience made Justin incredibly, violently paranoid, which made him a perfect candidate to become a information technology security specialist. The system works!

And it all started because he didn’t follow the mandatory security training that every employee needs to click through while half-paying attention. Imagine you live in a house full of vicious, murderous ghosts that only you can see, and all your family members keep doing horror movie cliche shit like leaving the doors open, shaking genie lamps they find in the parking lot, and reciting “Bloody Mary” three times into a bathroom mirror. The idea is that a horrible criminal or cyberterrorist could also use this rarefied power (“Hi, I’m the guy who is supposed to fix the servers.

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