An oh-so-interesting day.

On Friday a manager at work requested a meeting to talk to me as soon as possible. Before I could return to the computer to find that message, he had already scheduled me for a meeting this morning. As you all are aware, this is not typically a good thing. The long story is interesting, but wholly irrelevant and fairly confidential, so the short one will have to suffice.

A few months ago an anonymous individual (Well, I know who it was… and you could probably guess) called the Code of Conduct Violation Hotline at my place of employment to make largely falsified and greatly exaggerated allegations. Now, being a large corporation, all such allegations are taken quite seriously. So, for the past few months, they’ve been investigating the claims that your very own Pete Holiday did: a) gain unauthorized access to the email account of one or more persons and b) monitored the web activities of various employees of the company.

After the auditing department finished it’s phase of the investigation, one of my managers finished it up. The culmination was a meeting in which I was asked if I read other people’s emails, or had access to view their surfing habits. Now, people at the company have been fired for lying when they wouldn’t have been fired for telling the truth… that’s just how it is. So I was honest — no, I don’t read other people’s email. (I hardly have time for my own) but yes, I did check up on people’s surfing habits. It was my job.

That was consistent with what they’d found over the past two+ months of internal auditing and investigation. So, with assurance that the allegations wouldn’t be seen again by anyone that would matter to me in my future endeavors with the company, the case was closed and I was cleared of any wrong doing.

Now, knowing what I do, I can tell you with 99% certainty that these were blatantly false and malicious attacks meant to avenge a prior embarrassment. This is quite sad, as the embarrassment is almost a year old and would hardly be remembered if the other person would just let it die. Nevertheless… there are two very funny things about this whole situation:

First: I was accused of reading other people’s email and bragging about it. Not only did I brag about no such thing, but it’s not even feasible to do with my limited knowledge of the way the company exchange servers are arranged. For all intents and purposes, this is impossible.

Second: I was accused of gasp DOING MY JOB. Yes. That’s right. Last summer it was my job to write a program that analyzed the log files of all surfing activity. It was the software that they’d use to run their daily enterprise internet usage reports, and reports on individuals when requested by HR. A part of any good program is a testing phase… so, in order to test, I needed to run reports on people. End of story.

So I was accused of doing the impossible and doing my job. Sounds like (s)he wanted me to get a raise!

In other news, I spoke the good speech today but was not victorious. That’s ok. People laughed, and that was the point. I also took some pictures of the night time.

Day and Night — Ok… it’s night time, with a 15s exposure.
Headlights — Yet another extended exposure, this time with a car driving by.
Cool Sky — Just another view off of our back porch.
Sunset through the Trees — ’nuff said.

Ok… that’s it. Be good and stay tuned.