Building A Bridge With Walls
October 28th, 2006 | by Todd W |This week, I have been participating in meetings between my employer, a major pharmaceutical manufacturer, and an agency of the Federal Government. These meetings are routine, occurring from time to time.
In the course of the meeting, our guest wished to print a single page from a PDF file on a CD-ROM in her possession. Then ensued a comedy of the ‘impossible’.
It is against company policy to introduce any foreign media into our systems, so we could not access the CD on any company PCs. We cannot offer her a printer for her laptop, since policy forbids any non-networked printer in the facility. She could not email the file to us - in fact earlier in the meeting, I was asked by her to email a list of people attending the meeting to her account. I did so, as a Word attachment. The next day, all hell broke lose when the government agency e-mailed
all field agents about receiving emails from our company, and reminding them that they are never to be opened. Our own IT department then contacted me about my error and I assured them it would never happen again.
So there we sat: two gigantic, powerful organizations, befuddled over how to share a page of information. In the end, she had to copy it by hand from her screen, and we could then photocopy that page for our records.
Brought to you by technology hailed to usher in a new era of seamless communication.
To all of you spammers, virus spawners, and hacker asshats…thanks a pant-load.
