The straw that broke the camel’s back this afternoon was a salesperson who came to me inquiring as to whether I’d removed the suspicious software off of the laptop she’d been using a couple of weeks ago and had me do some work on before a major presentation to a major (and difficult) client. I noticed a couple of strange processes launching upon boot, and hadn’t had the time to fully investigate before she absconded with the machine. I extracted a promise from her that the laptop would be returned to me right after her presentation so I could finish dealing with… whatever that odd process might have turned out to be.

“Did you get that virus off of the laptop?”

I stared at her blankly for a full fifteen seconds, then said, “You never brought it back. I don’t know where it is. I never know where those damned things are.”

“Oh, I told [Immediate Supervisor] that you needed it. Do you mean he didn’t bring it to you?”

At that point I just laid my head down on my arm and pounded on the desk with the other in sheer frustration. Shortly afterward I left the building for the day, before I could get up the nerve to really throttle somebody.

Two weeks, and that laptop’s been running around, changing hands, being plugged into gods-know-what, and nobody gives a rat’s ass that there might be a major security problem in the making because of it. Nevermind that I’m the SysAdmin and would, in a normal office environment, be responsible for tracking and checking such equipment. Oh, no, I don’t even know how many laptops there are. I am not making this up.

Let me pose this question: Is it normal for people to promise to do something, then foist that task off on someone else without either telling the original promisee about it, or clearly stressing the importance of the task to the foistee? And if so, what penalty can I reasonably extract from these people, since I”m sure that my initial impulse of taking a clue-by-four to the offenders wouldn’t go over very well with the powers that be…?