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Doing the Laptop Drive of Shame
netbuzz writes "If you bring your work computer home with any regularity, chances are good that you've done the Laptop Drive of Shame. (Oh, c'mon, admit it.) It's happening more than ever ... and costing more than ever, too, what with the price of gas and all." I'll spoil it for you — they mean leaving your laptop at home. Yay, Monday news cycle.
Stupid unfunny slow news story. Not laughing 'cause it's like a lame stand-up-comedian-dont-you-hate joke. Get yer tomatoes out everyone.
This is the first time I wish I had been rickrolled instead of getting that awful article.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
Slow news day ... or no news day?
At the bottom of the
I don't live that far away from work, so if I ever forget my laptop it's not too much of a trek. To be honest I'm more likely to "forget" my pass and then I have to go and temporary one from the lovely girls in premises (I'm not stupid you know).
Seriously though, I usually just put my laptop bag, with the laptop inside it (the most important bit) across my front door so that I have to pick it up to open the door. Obviously this only works if you're the first person out the door in the morning...
Summation 2
Don't bring your work computer home. It's unsafe (unless you are very cautious) and it removes the separation of work and recreation. If you're doing it to use the computer for private purposes, buy your own. The price has gone down a lot and owning your personal computer reduces liability issues. Besides, if any of your spare time computer activities ever becomes valuable, there won't be the issue that it was produced with company equipment and therefore belongs to the company.
.
Well, during the "probationary period" I forgot it at home twice and had to do my hour commute home and my hour commute back. After that, I started leaving it at work. I think I talked about getting VPN set up so I could just log in from home rather than lugging the laptop around. Of course, I didn't last much longer at that particular job (Thank God), so it was kind of academic anyway.
I'm an absent minded guy so I figure out various tricks when I need to remember things and not lose things. However, it takes a while for me to set that kind of thing up.
"MIT betrayed all of its basic principles."
First of all, shouldnt this be on idle.slashdot.org... since its a time-waster and all?
That said, I don't have to worry about leaving laptops since I rarely take one home. However, being a government contractor, I do use a CAC which allows me access to my laptop. Leaving that at the house is effectively like leaving my laptop at the house. There have been numerous occasions where I have left my card at the house and had to the "drive of shame". Within the last two or three months, though, I have been riding to work, so in that case I have to do the "ride of shame".
...and it should be known by now
Didn't a famous violinist forget his 2 million dollar violin in a New York cab?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Wouldn't that more likely be the Fedex next-day-air mail drop of shame?
I haven't done that with a laptop, but I have done it with marketing material I was supposed to bring to a conference. What did they expect? I'm a programmer... They should be glad I show up to work with a full compliment of clothing every day, much less remember to bring their pack of branded security badge holders and 8.5 X 11 fliers of lies and shame.
My sig sucks.
Good God, editors, it's bad enough someone would submit this story, but you guys let it through?
Can we mod the editors out of office?
Would it be possible to add modding to the published articles? Can we prevent this submitter from ever submitting a story again?
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
Decline the laptop, and the Blackberry, and the pager, and the company cellphone... If it's that important, call me at home and I'll drive in. It never has been, though.
My coworker (with the Blackberry) regularly gets called for trivial things. Like: Where's that log printout? Hmm? You put it on my desk, you say?
Still, it's good to know my porn buddy will be there to remove my drive of shame when I die.
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=porn%20buddy
Well, it would be easier to lug that damned thing without the desk. Cut the chain.
Being an old and proud Slashdotter, I'd gone many months with R'ing TFA, and somehow I picked this morning to try it the other way.
Yay me.
Here's looking forward to another long stretch of blissful ignorance.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Warning: walkhome.jpg is a 3072x2304, 2.2 MB JPEG.
A couple of weeks ago I changed an on-site router for one with a better firewall. No-one had the admin password for the old one so I setup the new one from scratch without any reference point. I would normally leave the old router on site 'just in case' but I managed to 'tidy it up' and bring it back to the office.
Guess what, a few hours later someone from the site was calling because a piece of neworked kit (a stock management scanner) could not connect to its remote ordering server.
To cut a long story short, my colleague drove the old router to Portsmouth (UK) - about 30 miles - and it was put on a hovercraft over to the Isle of Wight, where it was picked up by one of the site staff!
That must be the hovercraft of shame!?
AT&ROFLMAO
"it's where I put my phone, wallet, diary, car keys and sunglasses"
I think the word you're looking for here isn't "brief case," it's "purse."
At work i'm one of the sysadmin, and so have a nice fat workstation and a few beefy "test" servers at hand.
But sometimes i bring my personal laptop to work (which, by the way, is my only machine at home that does have a display). Twice in the last two years i left it in my office after my workday. Given that i can't even watch TV without it, i have to return to work to fetch it. Luckily, it's only 2.5km between home and work and my access card is (naturally) a 24/7 one.
Nowadays, i always put my access card into my laptop bag when i took it to work. Without the card, i'm physically unable to leave the office (except in case of fire), so i'm very unlikely to leave my laptop behind...
Look, this thing is totally safe! Built it myself, you know. You just press that button like this and then turn that lev
Well, in my case it makes more sense to leave my company cell phone at home. While we have a spare one for IT that works perfectly well, its phone number mysteriously fails to show up in the company phone book and/or transmit the correct caller id....
Look, this thing is totally safe! Built it myself, you know. You just press that button like this and then turn that lev
"Sometimes I forget things and have to go back to get them. Now I leave my work laptop at home, and people laugh at me when I have to go back home to retrieve it."
It's not even news. It's just a pale, pale attempt to do Andy Rooney type fluff columns.
So yeah, I now regret reading the whole thing. It was a Rickroll that was so lame it didn't even have Rick Astley in it.
of course, is when the laptop makes it to the car, just not in the car.
throw new NoSignatureException();
I once had to do a software install on an ice-breaker. I had to fly out to the east coast, catch a twin-otter from a Canadian Forces base north to middle-of-nowhere-ville, then get flown by helicopter out to do an at sea landing on the ship.
After I arrived I discovered I had left one of the install discs on my desk at work.
Life is like a web application. Sometime you need cookies just to get by.
Remembering the notebook is easy - it is heavy. The powercord, now that's different. With notebook batteries lasting all of ten minutes on an older machine the power cord and transformer block become vital to remember. True pro's will have two of these though, one for work, one for home.
Again, this can lead to problems - visit a company, fire up the PC for a presentation and where's the power cord? One left at home, another left at work. The best solution is to have the transformer built into the notebook - as per early Toshiba's - however that makes the notebook weigh more in the reviews (where the brick is conveniently not part of the review).
But I've definitely forgotten my power supply, so I have about 2 hours to figure how to make that "drive of shame" without being noticed...
For the price of your drive home, or at least my drive home, you can buy another power supply. Yeah, I bought one out of my own money to save me the hassle, even though it's work's computer. (shrug) When lappy goes back on lease-return, I'll put this power brick on eBay and buy one to fit the new laptop, just like I did last time. The hassle savings of remembering and dealing with the power supply every day twice are worth it.
The real question is, why the fark does Dell keep changing the damn plug on the things? Gratuitous change specifically to make the old charger not work on the new laptop is all I can figure.
I occasionally do this on purpose, especially during the warmer months, so that I can go on a nice bike ride to retrieve the "forgotten" laptop.
Nothing shameful about it at all...
So just take a personal day and be done with it. Fabricating the "forgot laptop" story makes you look either like a forgetful idiot or a liar. Your coworkers and management can see right through it - we're not idiots you know. It's a lot easier to respect someone for taking a day when it's 75 and sunny, than that same person taking the day when it's 75 and sunny because they "forgot their laptop".
If you work for someone who doesn't like the honest approach, then get a better boss.
When even the editor says not to read the article I take heed.
We had one employee who forgot his notebook several times. Good coder, complete flake otherwise. Let's say his name is "Ben". Forgetting one's laptop became "Pulling a Ben". He's no longer with us.
I've forgotten mine once or twice but normally just far enough away that going home to get it then driving into work made far less sense than driving home and working through the VPN. We're allowed to do that on occasion. But obviously we can't be trusted to work from home and actually work. ~sigh~
I was able to get myself a docking station for home as well as for work so that I don't need to worry about forgetting accessories. They're in the bag for working at a remote location but otherwise all I need is the laptop itself.
As to where it resides when at home, it sits with my purse and my 'bag of things' that I use to carry my lunch and such. I bring it home because I'm a system admin and may need to dial in to fix a problem during off-hours. Unless that happens it just sits where I leave it. I feel no need to fire it up and work during my non-work time because the work will be there tomorrow. Same reason I don't have a Blackberry or a pager. If they really need me they can call.
Back to the topic on hand, if it really can be considered a topic. If I blank enough to forget my notebook I really shouldn't be working that day anyway. I used to have nice mindless paperwork I could do on those days but that's been given to someone else so I have to find other work I can do that won't harm anything. Documentation is generally the way I do on those days since we all know no one reads the darn stuff.
You know what helps cut down on this Laptop Drive of Shame? Letting your employees stay the fuck home instead of having to come into your cramped noisy cubicle farm, particularly if your office is on the outskirts of human civilization.
Not only does this reduce the Laptop Drive of Shame problem, it also saves more gas.
Now, raise your hand if your company gives you a laptop. Hi, you guys are most likely middle managers, so blow me about your whining about your company laptop. The rest of us are still shackled to a desktop.
If this whole laptop and gas thing mattered, we'd stop making people trudge into mind-sucking offices every day for no good reason except to make it easier to corral and boss them around.
Terrorists can attack freedom, but only Congress can destroy it.
(interpret "or" here in the Boolean sense).
We english-speaking humans have devised a shorter method for explaining that. Behold: "and/or"
Where I work, we have the option of monthly parking passes which are simply smart cards. The daily rate otherwise is $15.
If you are a monthly parker, and forget your smart card, however, you are STILL charged the full $15 daily parking rate, even though you paid for monthly parking.
I used to think this was simple extortion, until I realized that monthly parking is handled electronically, but daily parking is handled by a human and therefore actually costs more to implement. (why I can't just swipe a debit or credit card, as I can at many downtown unattended lots, I don't know).
Still, I'd think a montlhy parker who has forgotten his smart card should be refunded a good chunk of paying the daily rate upon presentation of a daily parking receipt and his active smart card.
Of course, don't get me started on automated car washes that don't warn in advance that (a) their debit card reader is down, and (b) their cash reader only takes exact change -- I was once stuck for 15 minutes in a car wash line with people honking behind me because the stupid reader with broken debit card handling wouldn't even take a $10 bill (and keep the damn change for a $7 wash). Automatec cash readers should ALWAYS allow an option to pay more for convenience if they can't provide change. Those that give receipts could easily indicate the overpayment so subsequent refund could be arranged.
The world is populated by morons. Some design stuff.
In Liberty, Rene
CmdrTaco needs to do the Slashdot Non-News Walk of Shame.
Overheard earlier during the morning's staff meeting...
Boss: Now take a look at Johnson over here. He's a real-go-getter... wish I had, well, 5 more of him. I see him saunter up to the front door and what is he carrying? A gym-bag. That's right, while the rest of you slackasses are toting around your briefcases, laptops and courier-bags, he's ready to to work so hard that he'll sweat. While typing. At his cubicle.
Hoi Polloi: (Shrinks down in his seat, embarassed, actually starts to sweat.)
Boss: See, he's even doing it right now! Now some of you might complain of the smell, but not me. This plumber's son knows all about sweat equity and the way my old man would stink to high-heaven every day after work. That's the smell of success. So quit killing time in the break room and by the copier, and start making this company some money already.
Boss: Meeting adjourned.