I am user #927

I was reading up on Corporate Governance the other day and about the Enron scandal. In the wikipeda entry, it stated that AOL had some corporate governance debacle recently, so I googled it.

I came across AOL's interesting data blunder, in which thousands of search strings were released for public consumption. No personal data was purposefully revealed, however, some of the search data proved to be quite telling.

Each user was identified by a unique search ID, with their search history accompanying. It was actually pretty interesting (in a voyeuristic way) to see what people searched for, and what they actually clicked on. Of note was a guy (presumably, hopefully) by the userid of #927

His appetite for websites is extremely varied, and most would probably add sick. But on reflection, actually, I figured my own searches would prove to be rather unpalatable to some. >.<

Are you able to say that you don't search for weird stuff?

For those who are interested, here is a mirror of the Full Search Data. It's a huge text file, so try opening it with Excel. Doesn't seem to work any other way for me.

I hate my job sometimes

Someone from my workplace was punished today. He used to be my subordinate, but is no longer, as I have changed departments. I was very upset about it.

He was an excellent chap who worked hard and gave no grief to his superiors while he was there.

But that has been forgotten now.

He was disciplined today, and even though I appealed to boss, he was still punished. Granted, he committed a mistake, but I sincerely felt that he did not deserve to be punished as harshly as he was.

His new superior wanted to make an example out of him, and to send the message that he did not condone ill-discipline. Fine and good, but I felt his actions was sending a wrong message.

Now, we are telling all of them that "We do not care what you have done in the past. You may contribute a hell lot, and work your ass off, but put one toe out of line, and there is no second chance given."

I am not being fair about this. Because I would not have done it were I in his superior's shoes. I agree that in my workplace, discipline is a very important thing, but I am upset because I failed to protect and support this ex-subordinate of mine. I appreciated his work while I was there, and he did put in effort and hard work. This is not always apparent in most people, but he was one.

I feel I have failed, and that I am sorry. But that does not matter to him, as punishment was already meted out, and he is serving it now.

Sometimes I really hate how the responsibilities I have correspond to the power (or lack thereof) I have in my workplace.

Random Musings

An interesting example of how one can put his foot in his mouth and then shoot it:

Michael: Okay, probably going to go late tonight, burning the midnight tequila. So, I think you all could just take off now.
Jan: Michael, this shouldn't take more than an hour.

J: Do you always shut down the entire office when you leave for an hour?

M: No, no. that would not be efficient.
[back-pedaling here]

M: Actually, they just don't get very much work done here when I'm not here.
[attempt to reason poor judgement]

M: That's not true, I know how to delegate.
[realising lack of leadership in previous sentence]

M: And they do more work when I'm not here.
[total incompetent managerial skills, or suggesting that he impedes productivity (which he does)]

M: Not more.
[more back-pedaling]

M: The same amount of work is done, whether I'm here or not.
[now we know his true value]

Excerpt from Episode 7 of Season 7 of The Office (US TV Series).