test please delete

[BrowneIssue]

Line management went into line management mode. I.e., mentalist.

I was eventually summoned to my manager's manager's manager's (MMM) office to be formally disciplined.

I had to stand there and be shouted at until I got the rhetorical question:

MMM: "What the hell did you think you were doing?"

Me: "My job. Here's a copy of my job description."

In this IT department of 350 people, approximately 150 were programmers of one grade or another producing bespoke code. Another 100 were analysts of some sort or another specifying code. (The remaining 100 or so were overhead.)

The management did not know we were writing code.

[BrowneIssue]

Eventually, I was ordered not to go about producing .EXEs that cause damage.

I tried to explain - no joy.

I tried to enlist the support of other Senior Programmers but nobody was going to put their job on the line. They had been sitting with their feet up waiting to see how this panned out. (Many were working on Unix boxes or the mainframe and were unaffected anyway.)

I compiled on C: from them on.

[BrowneIssue]

The network numpties loved it.

They sneered at me and muttered about "stupid software people that hack into servers and crash them" after that.

[BrowneIssue]

(That's when I wrote the keylogger TSR ... which was ... 'useful' from time to time )

[BrowneIssue]

I got my revenge.

Many times over.

[BrowneIssue]

These network numpties that think they are IT people drive me to distraction.

[BrowneIssue]

"You can't do this."

"You mustn't do that."

"That can't be done."

"No."

"It's against policy."

"I'll have to look into it."

[BrowneIssue]

Such people exist purely to prove their own worth by preventing others from doing what they need to do.

[BrowneIssue]

In a proper dictatorship, such people would be taken out the back and shot by the Commissar for sabotage.

[BrowneIssue]

Bear with me while I burn off some adrenaline...