Covert operations
THE accountant knew that taking the net admin to a meeting with the company’s newly acquired strategic partners (or is that newly-acquired-by strategic partners? The jury is still out…) would make for a few laughs, but he got rather more than he bargained for.
To begin with, the net admin turned up punctually to the minute and shocked the accountant speechless. Punctuality was well-known to be associated with the net admin in the same way as peace, love and brotherhood were known to be associated with Adolf Hitler. Even more shocking, the net admin’s customary white T-shirt was visible as such, having been freshly laundered, and his trousers were freshly pressed. Even his shoes lacked their seemingly permanent layer of dust and grime.
While the net admin was on time, everyone else was running late, and therefore the people he found the accountant with were not the strategic partners’ IT Dept. but a roomful of traderoids.
The net admin sat through the meeting, pretending to listen to the market talk attentively while in fact being near comatose with boredom. This was a technique he had perfected years ago, during Mary Demetropoulou’s Chemistry classes, and which had stood him in good stead during boss No. 1’s meetings. When the meeting finally came to an end, the accountant took him to the strategic partners’ Network Operations Centre, where the meeting he had actually come for was to take place.
One look at the place earned it the net admin’s instant disapproval. There were a couple of potted plants on the window sills and there was carpet on the floor. Carpets generate component-killing static electricity; the net admin wouldn’t even have them in his home. There were no cups with three-day-old coffee dregs in them, no empty soft drinks cans, no half-disassembled computers, and no piles of useless scraps of paper. In fact, to the net admin it didn’t look like a place where serious networking was done at all.
Worst of all, there was a notice board covered with useful titbits of network information, up to and including a nicely annotated, colour-coded network diagram. Such a relaxed attitude to network security was compete anathema to the net admin, who divulged information on his own network on a no-need-to-know basis. Of course, he immediately proceeded to swipe the diagram off the notice board and stuff it in his pocket, to the alarm of the accountant who exclaimed: “What are you doing?”
Normally, the net admin’s skills at unorthodox information retrieval would have rendered his act completely invisible, but the attention called to it by the accountant’s reaction alerted one of the secretaries who called out: “What’s that piece of paper?”
The net admin made a mental note to give the accountant’s laptop one of his patent ‘percussive maintenance’ makeovers later, and gave the secretary his sweetest smile. “What piece of paper?”
Before she had time to react, the strategic partners’ IT manager walked in and introduced himself. The net admin flinched inwardly; the man was wearing a tie. “How do you do? Step this way and meet the rest of the team.” They walked away from the notice board and the flabbergasted secretary to where a person was sitting at a workstation. “This is our network admin”, he said, introducing them to the back of a person sitting at a workstation. The back was indifferent to their presence there, until the person owning it was roused from his workstation by the IT manager. He was even more indifferent to their presence than his back had been.
The accountant tried to probe him about merging the two companies’ networks. This shook the tall, lanky owner of the back from his reverie, and he gave the accountant some valid-sounding reasoning about network privacy and so on. The net admin, being himself a practitioner of the fine art of deliberately confusing the technologically ignorant, got the true message: “I don’t like it and I won’t do it. Sod off.” He relaxed a bit; he was in the company of a colleague, a brother in arms in the eternal war between the managerdroids and the techies.
Postscript: It appears that some of the Madman’s readers are labouring under the misapprehension that the Network Admin actually administers the Cyprus Mail computer network. This is not the case. The paper’s network sometimes works.
Crazy Man from the Door
The Cyprus Mail is the only English-language daily newspaper published in Cyprus. It was established in 1945 and today, with its popular and widely-read website, the Cyprus Mail is among the most trusted news sites in Cyprus. The newspaper is not affiliated with any political parties and has always striven to maintain its independence. Over the past 70-plus years, the Cyprus Mail, with a small dedicated team, has covered momentous events in Cyprus’ modern history, chronicling the last gasps of British colonial rule, Cyprus’ truncated independence, the coup and Turkish invasion, and the decades of negotiations to stitch the divided island back together, plus a myriad of scandals, murders, and human interests stories that capture the island and its -people. Observers describe it as politically conservative.
