Sounds like someone ran out of year before they ran out of budget and had to spend the money on something so their budget wouldn’t get cut the next year…
I don’t have a dog in this fight - I work in a highly restricted room most other employees don’t have access to and use a badge multiple times daily - but this one got me. The above mentioned items might not be necessary, but forcing a passenger to choose between removing her nipple ring with pliers and missing her flight is going a bit too far.
This was my pet peeve working in IT in London. Our overlords decreed that passwords had to be 8 characters, contain at least one non-alphabetic character, one upper-case character, and no more than three consecutive alphabetic characters. They had to be changed every 30 days. Very secure, right?
Well, but everyone started using passwords like “Jan01Jan” then changing to “Feb02Feb” and so on. Sometimes I worry about security people.
No, it wasn’t. It was instituted when we moved to a new building.
But again, my specific situation isn’t the point. It’s the societal slope.
I don’t use tweezers, box cutters, nail clippers, or nail polish remover while flying. (Being a man, I don’t tweeze or wear nail polish, but that’s beside the point.) The pain in the ass is having to dig through your pockets and carry on and junk things that are on the list. What about my bottle of lens cleaner that’s slightly bigger than permitted? What about the woman who was forced to drink her breast milk in order to prove it was harmless?
Have you tried to board an airplane lately? Every few months the T.S.A. issues another list of banned items and the rules are inconsistently enforced.
Reasonable is a dubious term, as has been demonstrated. Those of us who feel that fire protection and security, as well as accountability are reasonable, have spoken. You, on the other hand, want to do what is convenient for you, although you are neither the person in charge of fire protection, security, the building owner, the lease holder, or anyone with a position of prominence, but consider your obstinate attitude reasonable.
If you don’t like the working conditions, then leave. You’re not entitled to an explanation of everything that goes on in the workplace, unless you’re one of the folks signing the checks. The only thing you’ve demonstrated is that you’re a lazy individual who can’t be bothered to take a passcard with him when he wants to go waste a half-hour in the crapper.
Damn, danceswithcats, you beat me to my post by two minutes.
For the record, ascenray, as a badge owner, you are not being restricted. Those without badges are being restricted. You are just being asked to behave in an adult manner (carry a passcard), and the way you keep shouting down the reasons why someone might restrict movement demonstate, to me, that you are being asked something that may just be beyond your grasp.
It may be a relative term, but it’s hardly dubious.
It ain’t just me, babe. It wouldn’t be a struggle between security and employees if I were the only one who objected to it. Lots of people are propping the doors open.
And my position is that people in “positions of prominence” should not be accorded unlimited authority over employees.
I should have expected this. Every time someone has a complaint about the workplace, someone comes in with “just leave then.”
[quote]
You’re not entitled to an explanation of everything that goes on in the workplace, unless you’re one of the folks signing the checks.
This is a bullshit attitude. Signing the checks doesn’t make you a god. As soon as you are unable to do everything yourself and need another person in order to make your operation run, you lose some moral authority to impose your will on the environment.
It’s funny how this is suddenly enough evidence to make a conclusion of “lazy.” Nice. It’s not that I “can’t be bothered” to take it. It’s that it is affirmatively annoying to have a passcard with me when I go to the toilet.
Yeah, you have enough evidence for that as well.
My old job was in a building where someone had been allowed to go a little overboard with the security doors. Yes, the work we did was contract work for hundreds of big-name pharmaceutical companies, and therefore highly confidential and had to be protected, but… this was what we went through every day:
Employees had a separate entrance than visitors, which had to be escorted at all times. Employees would have to swipe their card once to get from outside into an oversized closet, where we could hang our coats/change our shoes if we wanted. Standing in the closet lobby, facing the door, was a security guard. He or she was there pretty much all day, and made sure people had their badges with them. You could walk through this door with someone else, but no further. To actually get from the closet to the building, you swiped your card again, and went through a full-height, one-person-only turnstile. It wouldn’t be impossible, but it would certainly be hard to get two people through at once, especially with the guard watching you from 2 feet away! Oh, and a given card could only be swiped once every 15 minutes, so no passing it back to the next person in line.
So, you’ve made it inside. What can you go do? Well, you can pee, or go to the cafeteria. That’s all you can reach without having to swipe your card again. If you go to the left, you can get into the hallway which has doors to the production areas and the upstairs offices. All of these doors had to be swiped to get through them. In fact, the door to the stairwell to go upstairs required a key swipe, and then your only choice is a set of stairs… with a key swipe at the top. Because it was a high-security stairwell, apparently, what with that fire extinguisher and mouse trap.
Back to the cattle-herding turnstile, you could go right, and get to some offices, once you swiped. You could then swipe again to get to the labs, or you could swipe at a different door to get to a staircase that led to more offices… which also had a swipe at the top, of course. Because of the incredible protection needed for the plastic plant in the corner. You had to swipe to come back down the stairs, too.
If you stayed near the cafeteria, you could move forward and swipe, of course, to get to the office supply room, the nurses office, or HR.
The place was like Fort Knox. Thankfully, pretty much every zone had its own bathrooms, so you wouldn’t have to go through 23425 doors if you had to pee. We asked many times that the stairwell and office doors be unlocked, seeing as all personnel had access to all of these zones, while keeping the production areas and labs sealed, since thats where the stealable stuff is. Never happened.
Ah, now it’s in the definition of “adult.” One more step down the path of the surveillance society.
I can’t speak for your office, except to say that it is at least 3 stories. I can speak (based on asking security directors at two offices) to the skyscrapers I am used to. In the offices I work at, there is no surveillance on the cards. No one receives and reviews reports regarding when you enter, and as you don’t swipe the card to leave, no one tracks how long you were gone when you re-enter (other than nosy co-workers). Instead, they ‘ensure’ (except when the weakest link in the security chain, described above, is broken) that the people on the floor belong on the floor.
I do understand your consternation about opaque doors. Most of the offices I’ve worked at have tempered glass, but a few also have a second door that is opaque. Minor issue, usually encountered when you have people who like to fling doors open.
And I didn’t put “removing your nipple ring with pliers” in the list, now did I? I think we established that that’s not TSA protocol, but was a poor decision on the part of an employee.
Ah, right. :dubious:
Again, the woman with the breast milk was an isolated example of something that’s not a TSA regulation. Your lens cleaner can go into your checked bag. I’m not defending the list of crap TSA prohibits; I’m just saying that for most people, I doubt it’s such a pain in the ass.
And yes, I board an airplane several times a week. It’s part of my job. I don’t think it’s a pain in the ass to check most of my crap, and travel as lightly as possible in the cabin. YMOV.
Might I make a worthwhile suggestion, though? In the office where I previously worked, we had to badge into every door. (Ok, not the breakroom, but you had to go through four doors to get there, anyway.) We started out with swipe cards, and people bitched about how horribly inconvenient it was to swipe twice just to use the shitter. Removing the security measures wasn’t an option, because of the confidential nature of a lot of inter-departmental crap, or something like that. We suggested switching to proximity cards instead of swipe cards. No one bitched much after that.
The problem here is not that there should be some reasonable level of security procedures. The problem is that society has given security screeners a level of authority such that such “poor decisions” are able to manifest at all into incidents like these. There should be room in our society for someone to take a reasonable stand – “I’m not taking out my nipple ring,” “I’m not drinking my breast milk” – and be backed up both by onlookers and by the the airport management in a timely manner without having to miss their flights.
I’m curious why, when my OP includes a complaint about societal trends, this is worthy of such doubt.
Okay, so I don’t open boxes, clip my nails, tweeze my eyebrows, or remove nail polish when I fly. But I do clean my eyeglasses. See where the inconvenience comes in? And once I’m in the security line for the terminal, how am I supposed to put it in checked baggage, which went off at the airline check-in counter? It basically has to go in the trash.
Tell ya what, bub-give us the name of your employer, and all dopers who feel your pain can write them a letter expressing the horrific conditions in which you are forced to work, e.g. your dreadful trudge on company time to and from the company provided shitter (uphill both ways), and how oppressive it is for you to be required to carry your company provided card to open the company provided doors so you can get back to your company provided workspace, so you can waste more company time bitching and whining on the internet.
There aren’t enough rolleyes for ya.
So don’t clean your eyeglasses on the plane. I don’t think waiting until you land to clean your eyeglasses is a pain in the ass, but again, you could have a different view. Or, if you really, really want to clean your glasses onboard, take some cleaning solution. 3 oz worth. I can’t imagine you need more than that to clean glasses, unless you’re OCD or something.
Oh, a discussion on the Internet leads to a veiled threat to jeopardize someone’s job. Dances, you’re an asshole.
If we knew the employer, we could just e-mail somebody at the top & tell them to join the discussion at the SDMB. I’m sure he or she has nothing better to do with the afternoon…
(I work in a huge establishment with imperfect security. They do their best–but I’m a fan of keys, ID badges & computer passwords. If all those passwords are just too hard to remember, write them on a little card. Put the card behind your ID badge–not on the PC monitor. Keep the badge with you.)
Why should I have to think so far ahead and in such minute detail just to board a plane? And why are you so fixated on my specific examples? You don’t see any larger problem here?
Because they’re all you’ve given. And you should have to think so far ahead because you’ve chosen to travel by air, and pretty much everyone knows by now that that means “there’s some crap you can’t take with you.” It’s then your job to either make sure you don’t take that crap with you, or be prepared to discard it.
If the problem is convenience, then no.
Veiled threat, my left nut. You’re doing plenty to jeopardize your own job by refusing to cooperate with measures installed by those who are your superior, position and intellect-wise, and wasting your workday on the internet, when you should be doing your fucking job. If you wanna see an asshole, check your ID badge picture, bub.
P.S. This hasn’t been a discussion. You’ve been whining, and others have told you to suck it up.
So what is it that you want, ascenray? Just a complete lack of security inside the building? People can go anywhere they want once they’re in the building? Trusting that everyone who has a right to be in the building is okay to be on your floor? That’s one extreme. The other is the one mentioned by mnemosyne which I will grant is waaaay overboard. It seems management or building security has found a middle-ground that works for them, and you’re being all TTHW* over…having to carry a little piece of plastic with you when you go pee. I wish I had nothing more to worry about (having had auditors inhouse today to ensure that we’re following proper security procedures–which we are) than that.
I don’t buy your “incremental” arguement as applied to this situation either. [Setting aside any TSA problems, since your OP was about office building security.] Unless they’re requiring you to have the RFD implanted in your flesh, rather than in a little plastic card, you’re just whining, here. Sure, whine about the huge inconvenience of that giant, heavy piece of plastic. Maybe it makes you feel better to vent. I’m certainly cool with venting–I think it can be healthy. But I can’t see this as any part of a Slippery Slope or an affront to your personal liberties.
*The Terrorists Have Won