No I'm not letting you take somebody else's laptop.

The BBQ Pit
1

I’m sure that you are who you say you are. I’m sure that the laptop owner said it was OK for you to take it home with you tonight so that you can bring it to the big court case early tomorrow morning. I’m sure that he told you he “authorized it”.

However I don’t know you by your voice, I don’t have any way to verify your identity over the phone, and even if I did have all those things I’d still need to speak to the OWNER OF THE LAPTOP and verify his identity before I told him the combination to unlock the thing from it’s docking station.

No I am not being overly officious, we have had the damn things stolen before and frankly the replacement cost of the hardware pales besides the possibility of info critical to a case worth anywhere from hundreds of millions to billions of dollars walking out the door.

I arrange with someone to come in at 6:30am to unlock the laptop for the owner (who is supposed to know how to do this fer chrissakes) but you want to get an extra hour’s sleep rather than have to come in to pick the thing up tomorrow morning.

Geezus, this whole stupid episode could have been avoided. Completely and totally preventable.

a. The laptop owner should know how to lock and unlock the damn thing. It’s just an expensive, underpowered desktop otherwise. He could then give you the combination.

b. Don’t give me any crap about this. Verifying your identity consists of a little more than you saying “But it’s me!” over and over again, or “But we were both on the phone talking to someone else and the owner said that I could take it home.” You could be the fucking janitors for all I know.

Boy it’ll be nice to give the duty pager to somebody else tomorrow. Nobody else ever gets the bizarro calls, all the weirdos save up their problems just for me. It’s a plot.

Off to sleep,

2

But I promise not to put any scat porn on it!

Gimmie!

jerk. :frowning:

3

I make no such promise.

4

You don’t trust me? I’m insulted. Harumph!

5

Welcome to the world of the CEO. Sometimes it is that important. Sometimes they just don’t care about rules. I find it’s helpful to use the words “due diligence” and “property control system.”

Proprietary information is also good.

6

But…but…I was going to bring pie.

7

I like pie.

8

But… it’s ME!

9

But I already asked and its okay and who the hell are you anyway, some laptop Nazi?

10

Pie?? Where??

<whips out plastic fork>

11

I wonder how the guy would feel if I went down to the parking garage and was given the keys to his BMW or whatever associates are driving these days on the strength of “He said that it was OK for me to drive his car home for him!”

Lord knows we have enough situations where we do have to bend/break rules to get the job done (it’s a law firm, not an IT company, my job is to Keep Them Billing) and that’s one thing, but this was really pretty silly. Any fool can pick up a phone and say “gimme the combination to Joe’s laptop”, did he honestly expect me to fork it over?

And I like pie too. Soon as Passover has passed over…

12

Well you could always through the duty pager out the window right now!

13

Let’s try throw for a hundred dollars.

I need some coffee

14

Better than that, Tuesday was my last night on-call, it’s somebody else’s for a while now. Happy happy joy joy. Thank Crom we don’t have to answer an oncall cellphone.