Slashdot Mirror
White Lies Help Stressed Computer Users
An anonymous reader writes "Simple tricks allow one to appear to be hard at work in the office while actually forwarding calls, e-mails and instant messages to your mobile phone. One can backdate e-mails through rolling back a computer's built-in clock or use background phone noises to concoct convincing excuses not to go to work."
Stuff like this could become the first direction all fingers point when a company goes down.
So much for it being because a company's product got beaten out by a competitor, or because its leadership embezzled it into the ground, or creative accounting.
Everyone now will be looking for the back office Richard Pryor type (I forgot the name of the movie) as a scapegoat.
American workers are already being called the laziest in the world (by conservatives, mind you) while statistics show them to be among the most productive (overall, if not per hour). If we're such collective goof offs then why are we so productive?
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
If you're resorting to lies and trickery to avoid the work you ought to be doing, then you should quit. If your job is so bad, don't carry on with it. Find one you actually like, that you enjoy, that isn't something you want to avoid. You'll be a lot less stressed and you'll find life a whole lot easier.
http://twitter.com/onion2k
The SMTP server accepts email from any time -- you can be from a totally different timezone remember.
Also, did anyone else notice this at the end of the article?:
It took so many people to write that?
no, people are lazy, they just like to collect a paycheck. Sometimes I think people work harder at not working then actually doing the work.
From what was described in the article, I don't understood how the "cheating" took any less effort than something novel like... doing the work.
That's like friends I have who shorten "thanks" to "thnkx," because it saves them time. They're right! Wow, in 50 years, they might have saved enough time to watch an episode of South Park!
Neopets - the best free game on the Int
I like surfing the web with Lynx under Cygwin with the colors set to grays. To the average person who walks past it looks like I'm working. They think I'm doing some work using the command line. As the IT area in my office is too full I'm sitting in accounts where they have no clue what you are doing, but had I opened a web page in a regular browser it would look bad.
..or the companys mail/sys/netadmin, once The Boss gets irked enough of the "network delaying important work" all the time.
After that.. well, you can kiss your job goodbye..
You can always say that your private mailserver only sends out emails every day at noon. But, punched out by the flu as you were, you didn't remember that when you sent the email 07:30 that morning.
There are millions of excuses, but I think one's better off with the truth. "Sorry boss, but I'm really burned out these days, can I please have a couple of days off?" is much better than if your PHB notices that you've been lying to him every monday for several months.
When I read the title, I thought it was about the kind of white lies you tell users who get stressed out with their computer, in order to not make it too technical for them. "The big yellow 'E' was the source of the naked women who scared little timmy. Now when you want to get to your internet, just click the red fox on the blue ball. That's your internet now. Also, the blue bird with the envelope will get your mail for you now." Or when you try to hold your laughter when a user walks up to you and proudly declares he bought a "harder disk" for his movies, and just say "really? Thats cool." (pretty hard that one, though)
Fox can take the sky from you.
Do you think that bosses know how to check e-mail headers? 90% of them only know how to start Outlook if the icon is sitting directly on the desktop.
"Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life."
If anybody was on to you, they could sit down at your desk and do some nefarious things under your network login and you'd be ultra hosed.
Sure, you could pretty much no matter what with physical access to the machine, but not locking up at night would practically be inviting it.
If conservatives had their way they'd abolish things like statistics (and learning in general) then state conjecture about 'lazy american workers' as fact and vehemently deny that it was otherwise while spinning it back on liberals as a form of 'commie pinko' support of the working class.
Just remember it's the hard, intelligent, innovative real Americans outside the quasi-work of politics that do all the work in business, industry etc. that supports these asswipes, gives them a forum to air their views and made America such a great nation in the first place.
Me personally, I'm a 'disgruntled idealist' who has tried to find ways to come to grips with such things. A good quote that comes to mind was from the military strategist John Boyd.
"One day you will come to a fork in the road. And you're going to have to make a decision about what direction you want to go." [Boyd] raised his hand and pointed. "If you go that way you can be somebody. You will have to make compromises and you will have to turn your back on your friends. But you will be a member of the club and you will get promoted and you will get good assignments." Then Boyd raised the other hand and pointed another direction. "Or you can go that way and you can do something - something for your country and for your Air Force and for yourself. If you decide to do something, you may not get promoted and you may not get the good assignments and you certainly will not be a favorite of your superiors. But you won't have to compromise yourself. You will be true to your friends and to yourself. And your work might make a difference." He paused and stared. "To be somebody or to do something. In life there is often a roll call. That's when you will have to make a decision. To be or to do? Which way will you go?"
They are; if you can look at all the headers on a mail message you'll see the arrival times as it hops from server to server. But the recipient normally only sees the "Date:" header, which is set by the mail client, and this is easily hacked, as TFA says.
Some related anecdotes:
I have a friend whose PC clock is about 20 minutes past, it's disconcerting to receive messages from the future, and weird when my reply is 10 minutes ahead of the question (hard to make sense of the mailbox later too). He ignores my pleas to get a simple NTP client.
A few months ago I found some of my messages were taking a very long time to get through to certain people. Getting them to bounce back the complete message showed their ISP had rejected my message temporarily (I forget the error number), which prompted my ISP's mail server to wait several hours before retrying. It turned out this was a braindead anti-spam measure, if any mail server sent "too many" messages" in a given period they were throttled. Of course, since my ISP is very large it was easy to trigger this with a spike in normal message traffic, let alone any rogue spammer.
"Unless you start your own business and all that, of course most businesses fail in the first year."
I suggest people look at how those numbers are computed. Apperances can be deceiving.
It's my freshman year of college again, and someone who just watched the Matrix is trying to look like the most enlightened philosopher in the world to impress drunk girls. Oh, and roll in a healthy dose of Marxist rhetoric, some rather shady connections (remember people, slacking and terrorism are two sides of the same card) and you've got a recipe for an insightful Slashdot post.
It's good to see that people are still civil in their discourse even though others, like myself, often times resort to sometimes rude jabs. Sorry if my points came off sounding a little arrogant.
Americans will become more aware as things get worse. If they don't get worse, people will pay no attention to it. Look at the london bombings and the Carl Rove fiasco. People are starting to see through things and doubt the often touted "official story". The current political structure in this country is going to be hit hard by a hard pressed, overworked and underpaid constituency and it's not going to be pretty. People are looking for any excuse to tar and feather politicians so I think we're starting to see this resentment come to a head.
If people want to learn, they have to first learn to question. Ask anyone if they trust the media and they'll undoubtedly say "no". But at the same time, they simply turn around and listen to what they have to say anyway, often taking it at face value as actual fact. These people need to learn not to believe everything that comes out of the glowing tube or is printed on paper or keyed into a web site somewhere. Just with the web, people can lookup far more information than previously possible.
The politicians are messing up and its becoming obvious to people thus, they are questioning. This will bring them around towards becoming more informed and as a result, more active. I expect to see the next election have record turn out.