So I needed to move them from one server to another. Spools first, then made a little script that people could run which deleted the printers and re-added them.

“Please click start, run, paste this line of text in, and click OK” the email said.

“You would be better doing this than allowing everyone to do their own,” came the reply from a Director.

Sweet joy.

Nobody new. Well, me, being his manager, didn’t know. So I asked him about it today.

“Where were you Monday?”

“It was my day off.”

“You didn’t tell me.”

“Did I need to? I told H, and she put it on the wall chart.”

“It’s not in your calendar.”

“It says ‘Crawley’.”

“That means nothing to me. It doesn’t say Annual Leave, so I presume you’re still around, and still answering your phone.”

“Well, I did all I needed to, as far as I’m concerned.”

“As far as I was aware, it’s courtesy, if nothing else, to notify your manager when you intend to have a day off.”

“I did,” came his reply.

Oh. Okay. Last time I checked, I was his manager. At least, that’s what it says on my Job Description (which, incidentally, I am the only person in the whole company who has a JD).

The first part of the meeting was a summary of the previous meeting for people that had not attended. Excuse me, is that not what minutes are for?

Anyway, we were running through things, and one of the items was the helpdesk system we use. It’s a web-based system with a MySQL back-end.

“So it connects to a database?” J said.

“Yeah,” came my enthusiastic reply.

“And this is where?”

“On the hosting account.”

“And the password for that is?”

“For what, the database or the hosting account?”

“No, I know the hosting account password,” he said, and he’d be right, after they un-ceremoniously snatched it from me the week before. “The database password.”

“Why would you want it? You would never need it unless you wanted to tinker in the database, and I strongly recommend you don’t.”

“But we just need the password,” said J. “In fact, is it one of these?”

And, to my horror, he held up a print-out of all the MySQL database names, and their associated usernames and passwords, to me. He then pointed out that this sheet was in the hand-out that all the attendees of the meeting had been presented with.

I sank a couple of inches farther in my chair. “Yes, second one down,” came my reply.

This company has a huge, massive obsession with passwords. They MUST know the password, even if they don’t actually know what the password does. I could create an account called Ben, make it a member of every privileged group on the network, set a secure password, and nobody would know it existed.

(Memo to self: leave back door.)

Then, I could remove the privileges from the Administrator account, mangle the user profile and logon script etc so that the account was useless at a terminal, and then prevent it from logging on anywhere else. Voila, a useless Administrator account.

Since my last post I’ve learnt that no less than four people, other than me, now know the domain administrator password, because my co-worker “could not be bothered” to escalate their privileges correctly, so he just handed the password to them so they could do it themselves.

“Sorry, sorry. I was busy, I was just on the way out the door,” was his reply. Not excusable. I’ve now got to change the password on every single device – every printer, router, switch, etc (a unified password strategy is not a favourite one of mine, but it was the one I was told to implement) – because of his laziness.

But back to this meeting, where I started complaining about how well-known the password was.

“That reminds me,” said M, the newcomer, “that rescue password you left in the safe for me is not the one that’s in this document,” he said, waving the minutes where J had handily documented the Domain Admin password, against my wishes.

“Why did you open the envelope? Have I died?”

“No, I just wanted to see. You know.”

“Not really.”

“Well, it’s a good job I did, because it’s not the one here.”

“What is the one that I apparently gave you then?”

“It’s pa55word.”

I quickly thought back to why I would have assigned that password.

“That password is for your test-bed CCTV server.”

He was already on the phone. “Can you do me a favour? In the safe, there’s a white envelope, with ‘Bristol Passwords’ written on it. Can you open it and tell me what’s in there? … Uh-huh? … Yep, that’s the one. Yeah, just open it. … Ok. … Yep … Yep … Yeah, that’s fine. Just put it back in the safe now. Thanks for checking.” He turned his attention to me. “Yeah, you’re quite right, it is the one in this document.”

So wait, he’d just told a random member of staff where the admin password was? And this fifth person now knows the password too?

It was 5:02pm. At a natural break in the conversation, I snapped my folio shut, stood up, and said “wow. What a way to spend a day. See you tomorrow!” and briskly made my way out the meeting room.

In nine days time I leave. And I can’t fucking wait.

Well, two weeks after I handed my notice in, it seems as though they’re having the jitters about me holding so many accounts (website, online backup, etc) and have started contacting the organisations I deal with behind my back in order to secure control of them before I leave.

I’ve had access to the web hosting accounts taken off me, and I’ve discovered that they’ve been requesting copies of the agreements that were set up in order to ensure that somebody proper did authorise them.

K (in an email to our online backup supplier): “I would be very grateful if you could scan to me a copy of the document we signed to set up this agreement (i.e. who signed the agreement)  and also a copy of who signed the direct debit mandate please.”

This was sent yesterday at 11am. The reply came: “We have retrieved the paperwork requested and can confirm the name of the person that signed the application form was P_________.”

(P is one of the company’s unofficial directors.)

I was given the same task to do at The Emergency Meeting We’ve Been Needing To Call For The Last Year But Are Only Just Doing It Now Because He’s Leaving™ that we had yesterday, at roughly the same time, so I sent our backup supplier an email.

“Hi ______, Please see email below and the attached fax of the signature I sent to K______ a few minutes earlier. She also requested this information yesterday morning.”

Great, so that makes us as a company look like we’re really well organised.

I’ve just emailed Heart Internet, our hosting company, about what’s happened to my reseller account, and they’ve given a boilerplate response that I should talk to the person in accounts who requested the change.

So, I phoned J. “I’ve had my access to the Heart Internet account taken off me.” He knew nothing about it, and said that he’d talk to K and try and resolve the matter.

I’ve got a feeling that it’s gone past that stage now though, don’t you?

Excel then reported that the file was locked for editing, and who it was locked for editing by. Say, it was locked for editing by someone called Jane.

So what did this person do? Did they go to Jane’s desk to ask that the file be closed, or close it themselves?

No, don’t be silly. She asked a coworker, then the rest of the people in the office, then got up and walked around, looking at screens.

Then she came back, looked at the message again, and said “oh,” and walked off to Jane’s desk.

Head, meet hands.

“I understand you’ve handed in your notice,” said J, “and I want to talk to you about that on Wednesday, if you’re around. As a you-and-me thing, not a company thing.”

“Sure,” I said. We then talked about our committments for that day, as I may be going on a junket with a colleague.

I was then given the good news that as soon as I get the one thing that I’ve currently got open on my desk sorted and closed, then I can go. “No point in postponing it, really,” J shrugged.

Looking forward to what Wednesday brings. I’ve been mulling this over in my head: if they ask why I’m leaving, what do I say?

I’m tempted to just say “look, I don’t want to leave with a cloud over me. This isn’t the job for me, and I’m not the person you need in your organisation right now. I don’t want to annoy anyone and I don’t want you, or CSL, to annoy me. So it’s in everyone’s interests for me to go.”

We’ve come a long way, as is detailed by my writing on the wiki. I’ve started writing a “user manual” for the new network manager, which, I imagine, will be the person that I took over from (who has since been reinstalled elsewhere). There’s the content management system on the website, oh and the bits of the template that you need to edit to do this, that and the other. Oh, and the bit of flash – that needs to be handled like so. And the DNS on the network is a little flaky – oh, I’ll need to put that bit in about the OpenDNS system, and the support system that we use. Ooo, the email. That’ll need documenting. And the hosting. And, and, and…

I’ve got my work cut out for me, but I think the best thing to do is get the network documented, get my head down and get out. The sooner I leave, the better.

Does anyone have any advice on what I should say at my exit interview?

I’ve got to drive to the branch office tomorow, which is over 80 miles away.

There and back, 160 miles, at 40p/mile, that’ll be at least £64 I’ll be charging them for fuel that they’ve actually already paid for.

Winner!

Then, I copied my documents onto my laptop, and download DBAN, and booted my PC off it.

(Note to the non-technical: DBAN irrecoverably destroys data on hard drives.)

After a bit of motivation from The Wife, I took my letter of resignation, sealed in an envelope, and asked my boss if he had a few minutes.

“Sure. Let me just bring my laptop.”

You know, to make sure that I had his full attention.

He let out a coy smile when he saw the envelope. He sat down, and opened his laptop. I handed him the envelope. The smile was replaced by the frown of an angry Dad when he read the contents.

“Ok. Thanks.”

And with that, he closed his laptop, and returned to his desk.

I shuffled off downstairs, and heard nothing further.

In March ’07, I asked K, the person who looks after the money, if I could have a fuel card. K obliged and promptly ordered me one. Since that day I stopped keeping track of my business mileage, as it would have been rude to claim for mileage when I wasn’t paying for my fuel.

Around April/May time I asked what implications this would have on my tax. “Not sure,” came the reply,so we (me, K and my boss P) mutually and informally agreed that, because I was paying for my car and the wear and tear, they’d pay for my fuel and not tax me for it.

Case closed.

Roll forward fifteen months, I’m sitting around the table with the three of them looking at me.

“Who authorised your fuel card?” said P.

“Well, I don’t know,” came my reply. I looked at K. “If memory serves me correctly, I asked you for it,” tipping my head towards K, “and you just sorted it out for me. I also spoke to you about it,” looking at P now, “as I was unsure of the tax implications, and we all agreed to overlook it until we had answers.”

“No I didn’t,” came P’s reply.

“Don’t you remember?”

“If I’d have done it I would have remembered, but at no time at all have I had a discussion with you about your fuel card,” P insisted. “V didn’t know you had one, J didn’t know you had got one, and I didn’t know you had one, so I don’t know who authorised it.”

J said “the first thing V said to me was ‘who is he to have a fuel card? I don’t even have one. Why does he need one?’ and even I don’t have one.”

“All I know is I asked for one and I got one. I don’t really see how this is my fault.”

“We just need to know who authorised it,” J said.

“Yes,” P said, looking at me.

The tone of my voice changed slightly. “Are you incinuating that I authorised it myself?”

“Well, I didn’t authorise it, nobody else sat around this table authorised it, so we need to find out who did.”

“How exactly would I have ordered my own fuel card after I’d only been working for the company for three months?”

“In his defence,” J interrupted, “if he was to go to the person responsible for fuel cards and ask for one, the person he asked probably didn’t think to check, so we need to establish why an authorisation wasn’t sought at all.”

“You either have a fuel card with a company car or not at all,” P said, “so no authority needs to be sought.”

“Obviously it does,” J said, “or we wouldn’t be in this place.”

P opened his mouth, and closed it again. He folded his arms, and adjusted his position in his chair.

K remained silent. Apparently I’ve used £2,882 worth of fuel since last March, and that doesn’t include the last two months. So now I have to go back through the last year’s worth of records (which I only have from putting together pieces from emails and my diary) to find out where I’ve been and how long it took.

If I can prove that, at 40p/mile, I’ve done more than £2,882 worth of business mileage, then it’s not classed as a benefit, and I can even claim more mileage on top of that.

Unfortunately my records only add up to £1,800 worth at the moment.

“There’s only one thing left,” J said.

“You want the card back?”

“Yes please.”

I went downstairs, saw that my job offer letter was in my email, smiled, and got my keys to go home.