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Ohio Official Docked Vacation Time For Stolen Tape
Lucas123 writes "The missing tape, stolen from an intern's car, contained data on all 64,467 state employees, 19,388 former employees and 47,245 Ohio taxpayers. The state believes the incident will cost them $3 million. So after four months of deliberation, the Ohio Department of Administrative Services
announced today that they decided to take a week's vacation away from Jerry Miller, their payroll team leader and the guy in charge of the missing data."
So, if this cost them $3 million, and they took a week's vacation away, his yearly salary must be $156 million. I think I know where I should be looking for a job now.
Isn't the company responsible for negligence carried out by an employee in the course of his duties...
Imagine what would have happened to him if he'd been busted sharing a couple of dozen copyrighted songs online. Probably would've had his sick-leave cancelled too.
Take away 1 week of vacation time?
If I screw up that bad at my work, I'd be facing a discharge...
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would feel a bit differently if they are one of those who will get victimized (ID theft for one) as a consequence of this slip up. It may yet happen.
Tired and stressed people make more mistakes. Without vacation he will make more mistakes.
Depends on on your level in the organization. If you do this and you're just a peon, you get fired. If you do this and you're the CEO, then a department gets axed and bunch of peons get fired, you retire with a several million dollar golden parachute and stock options.
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But of course, it's all about the revenge. Water droplets? Arm/leg twister? Acid (.. music)? Tazers! It sure will help with the lost records!
From personal experience, trying to do more work and cut off your vacation is the most sure-fire way to bring your work quality and productivity down.
Are they trying to set him up to lose another tape?
I wonder how much those four months of deliberation cost them. All that work just for some petty punishment. (of course you yanks only get like six days of paid vacation a year, so maybe it's harsher from your perspective, lol.)
Okay, so the state thinks it will cost them $3 million. That's all well and good, but the real damages from this security breach will likely be much, much greater.
We're talking about personal information for 131,100 people here. ID theft being all the rage these days, and assuming that all these people are screwed, $3,000,000 comes out to just over $22 a person.
I doubt that every last person getting targetted will be the case... And I have no idea what the average ID theft victim ends up losing (I imagine that's hard to quantify - with direct losses, the time and money spent repairing the damage, and the impact on your credit history). Even so, I think a lowball estimate would be 25% of these people getting cheated out of an average of $3,000 or so. That right there is a little over $98 million.
Now then, I'm the first to admit that I could very well be grossly overestimating things... But really, come on now - a weeks vacation for what could potentially cost the state and it's citizens over a hundred million dollars? Hell, if I could get away with that kind of misconduct with penalties like that, I might just "steal" that tape from myself.
Also, it's evident it wasn't 100% on him. The data was stolen from an intern's car. He bears the indirect culpability of not encrypting it, not backing it, trusting the intern, whatever. It's natural to feel that "heads should roll" but why should the onus of all this fall necessarily on him? (Well, maybe it all should--I'm just going off the blurb in the summary.)
On the other side of it, a week's vacation time is ridiculous, whether or not he's at fault. If he is, well, there should be a real punishment. If he's not, it's fairly idiotic to slap him around just for the show of doing so.
And how much did the four-month long investigation cost? If it was more than a week of this guy's vacation time... yeah, well, that was another win for the taxpayers, wasn't it?
The way it should have worked is that there should have been a clearly defined set of rules, a clearly defined set of responsibilities, and a clearly defined set of repercussions. When employee X neglected responsibility Y, he should have already been aware that Z would be the punishment, and Z should have been what happened immediately afterward. You might need a four month investigation to find the harddrive thief, but you shouldn't need more than a week to handle violations of internal policies.
When things get complex, multiply by the complex conjugate.
From my experience people who do grossly inappropriate things get usually kicked out of the company. If these two get just this minor punishment it might be because the organization did not have clear enough policies and procedures for storing and handling the data. If there are no rules or employees do not know them, people can not be held accountable for any wrongdoing. If this is the case, even this vacation time punishment is too severe.
On the other hand, maybe the organization subscribes to the principle of giving people a second chance.
The terrible truth is, that after the data was lost, they were not sure how much vacation time anyone still had but they were pretty sure he had a lot of it so he was probably burned.
That will teach him next time.
On Wall Street they say "buy low, sell high" On the pad we say, "buy high, sell high" Isn't that somehow better?
The guy made a mistake. We don't know him or the situation. He may be otherwise great at his job.
What's all this crap about his punishment should match the cost of the mistake rubbish?
If a doctor makes a mistake and a patient dies, do we kill the doctor?
Mr. Miller announced "Well, fuck it," and decide to revoke all Payroll DB access rights, delete the tables and go on "permanent" vacation from the job. Problem solved!
On a more serious note.... what happened to the intern?
-- I'm not a pessimist, I'm a realist. It's not my fault that life sucks so much. --
Yes, very true, indeed. Americans pay more tax - as measured in days of labor - than almost any other nation on the planet. A significant portion of this tax goes to 'Keeping the world safe from '.
Remember that the next time some Western European slags off the Yanks within earshot. They paid for the reconstruction of most of the Western European economies after WWII, and footed the bill for keeping the Soviets out during the Cold War.
This same thing happened in Japan, don't forget.
So, when they do get their f*&#ing measly 10 days of annual vacation, they certainly don't want to spend at least two of them traveling to/from a foreign country, only to be insulted for their selflessness. I agree it's sad that Americans simply don't travel as much as many other nations do, and yes, this certainly is a significant cause of American ignorance of the rest of the world. Unfortunately, it is simply not the fault of the 'average' American that this is the case.
I recieved one of those lovely "We lost your data" letters ... 2 months after the incident. So, as one of the individuals who was personally impacted by this, I'd like to say a few things:
1) Their IT staff is incompetent. In my department, we ship over 50TB a week to our DR facility in England. We have had instances where tapes were lost in transit (thanks FedEx!) but the data was encrypted. No harm, no foul. That being said, their idea of sending tapes offsite was to put it in the back of an intern's car. GENIUS!
2) This petty hand-slaping is absurd. Yes, I want the idiot fired and replaced by someone who gives a damn about data management, security, and data classification.
3) 2 months to contact people who were on the tapes?! FFS!
4) Their incident handling in the media was that the criminals would need "specialized knowledge and tools" to extract the information. It says what kind of tape it is right on the case! That, and a little Google go a long way. Stop feeding the public a line of BS and own up to the fact that it's really not that hard to get the data off the tape.
There are others, but those are the ones that are pissing me off at the moment.
Announcer: "Jerry Miller, you just caused the loss of $3 million for the state of Ohio, and negatively impacted the lives of more than 100,000 people. What are you going to do next?"
Miller: "I am apparently NOT going to Disney World."
And it's been argued that much of America's post-war prosperity was due to the rebuilding of- and trading with- rebuilt economies. Had Europe fallen into economic disrepair, that certainly would have made it more likely to fall under Soviet influence, and again, become a threat to the US.
So we both won in this case. I think America's actions in the post-war era were as much enlightened self-interest as altruism, and nothing wrong with that- just don't get too sanctimonious about it.
As for "'keeping the world safe from insert dictator/regime/dogma here'" in a modern context, were you thinking of the war in Iraq?
No wonder they haven't done "Who Wants To Be A Turkish Millionaire" on Howard Stern lately!
Also, a little known fact - the UK has only just (in the last year or 2) paid off the debt that they had with the US. Apparently, the US offered to help, as long as the UK paid all their troop costs, fuel costs, etc. The UK has been paying it off slowly since 1945, although the US let us off the interest. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6215847.stm
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It is rare that a person accepts responsibility in the private sector, it is even more rare that they accept it in the civil service. It goes to show that this man has a decent moral character.
How frequently do your vacations include flying across an ocean? If your trip is any shorter, it isn't at all equivalent to leaving the US.
The real reason many people never leave the USA is because it's simply a huge place, spanning a large continent. Also, everything most people could want to see in their lifetime can be found inside the US. Here in the west, in a day I can drive from my house, to the tallest mountain in the contiguous US (4421m, Mt Whitney), past the oldest living organism (Methuselah tree) on earth, through a forest with the tallest trees on earth (Sequoia), to the lowest point on the content, right through the area with the highest recorded temperature on the planet, then, for good measure, round off the day by visiting The Grand Canyon.
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He didn't get fired, and if you're upset that he didn't get fired, consider the situation from the point of view of someone who doesn't hate managers on principle and is interested more in the health of the company. Why get rid of a perfectly good executive when you don't have to? It's easy to get the department back in working order if you're replacing a peon, but not if you are replacing the department head. So the intern is toast, but the guy 3 levels above him stays because it's better for the company that way. It's not like anyone should expect the business world to be fair in the first place (else why does my boss get payed so much more than me?), so why are you surprised?
Relax I just want some peanuts.
If you're a hard-working go-getter in the public sector, more power to you. There definitely are some folks in government who are hard working. My wife, when she worked for the city, was one of them. But it's not the banker's hours or some nefarious "agenda" of pundits that drives public opinion.
The real issue is that the perception the public has isn't drawn from the class of "all government workers.". The public's perception is based on things like the California DMV offices, where dozens of citizens stand in long lines while about 50% of the "workers" behind the counters engage in banter, sit idly staring off into space, and generally appear to be doing nothing much; or the city clerk's office, where the belligerent receptionist can barely contain her indignation that you've interrupted her game of Solitaire to tell her you've arrived for an appointment; or county road workers, who are frequently seen in groups of seven or eight, where one guy is digging and the rest are all leaning on shovels/brooms, and chatting on cell phones; or the folks who are so hidebound that they can't imagine a solution to a problem that hasn't been carefully documented in the official handbook; and on, and on, and on.
Until all the citizen-visible positions in government are filled by hardworking, customer-service oriented folks who take their breaks out of site of the waiting area (an outcome so unlikely as to be impossible) the perception isn't going to change.
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Yeah, and if you've done six impossible things this morning, why not round it off with breakfast at Milliways, the Restaurant at the End of the Universe?
All of which involve leaving the US, you tool.
I am trolling
Well, I can do a lot of that, but a lot of it doesn't interest me. I can visit the Rockies, go see the columbia ice fields, relax in hotsprings, go to the top of a mountain, all within a days drive of me too, but I'd rather go on a vacation where I can see really old buildings (over 300 years old), visit new cultures, experience new foods, see the world from a different viewpoint. I've seen the natural wonders my fine country (Canada) has to offer, and loved them, but I also want to see other places, and learn other cultures. there's only so much sightseeing you can do.
Where did I ridicule anyone? please let me know. or is it that i dared to disagree with you, if so why does stating my differing opinion injure you so much? there was nothing I said that was worthy of being attacked for. and our "strange and exotic foods" are all pretty much from other places, we don't really have a national cuisine. And the ones that generally cause the "midnight dash" are typically US corporate food chain restaurants. (McFood)
And where did Spring Break and wet t-shirt contests come in? I never said Canada was a bastion of ancient architecture and culture, I said I like to go to places where I can discover new cultures... I'm already here, I know Canada's culture. But I want to experience the culture of Japan, Thailand, Germany, Italy, France, England, Sweden, Egypt, etc. So some people (read you) don't want to, I'm merely stating that there's other reasons people take vacations than siteseeing, at least for some people. Don't get in my face because I disagree with you. Ignoring other cultures doesn't make you better, it doesn't make you worse. It makes you different, and that's all i'm saying. you're different than me. Not better, Not worse. Different. this isn't a flame, this is merely statements. nothing even remotely inflamitory i don't think, I tried really hard. especially since my talking about what I like to do for vacations is considered ridiculing others, quote me if you want, but I didn't say anything to ridicule you or anyone else on their choice of vacation. just letting you know that there are more than one reason for trips.