Unethical people really piss me off. And today is my Friday, so I have even less patience for their BS.
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So, I’m trying to use a third-party tool from a corporate-blessed vendor for a big project.
I’m trading emails with the developers of the tool, trying to figure out how to do something that should be pretty fundamental in the tool…but the tool doesn’t seem to be able to do.
We’ve reached the point in the email chain where the developers have said “we can’t figure it out from email and screenshots; please send us a copy of what you’re doing so we can figure out what you’re doing wrong”
I don’t want to send them the full thing, partly because it’s distractingly complex, and partly because even though there is an NDA in place, I don’t want to share that much proprietary information (and some of what I would need to share is proprietary to a different third party).
I just spent a couple of hours building a much simpler version of the thing, one that has exactly the same issue as the big thing, and which is populated with completely and obviously fictitous information. (Exactly $1m of premium, $500k in loss…)
I package it up and send it out so the developers can look at it when they start work in a couple of hours…and the corporate mail nanny blocks it because apparently I am trying to send sensitive proprietary information.
WTF?! And, since it’s after business hours for our IT folks, and because of the time difference vs the devs…I have no shot at getting this resolved before Monday. 
And, of course, in the process, all my stuff got rebooted for the monthly patching.
It’s time for a remake/reboot of Office Space.
Next thing you know, I will get in trouble for having the wrong TPS image as my background on Teams calls.
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is it in Excel ?
No.
The offending data is contained in three zip files. Two of them are backups generated by the third party tool which appear to just contain field names and the obviously fictitious data.
The third ZIP file contains three csv files which were admittedly generated in Excel, where the data is admittedly not obviously fictitious, but is in fact the result of a bunch of =LOGNORM.INV(RAND(),…) formulas.
Document the 
outta this!!! 
Oh well. Was going to say, cut the thing you are sending in half and send half to a test email address, rinse and repeat til that works. By doing so you could quickly narrow down what the mail nanny thinks is proprietary and not send that part. It works well for Excel because it’s easy to cut those files in half by deleting half the sheets. But I don’t know if it’ll work for whatever you’re trying to send.
Alternatively, uploading it to a corporate approved file sharing application/website might work.
That’s a whole 'nother can of worms.
Tell your company if they don’t have one of those they’re behind the times.
Another crazy idea I had was to change the file extension of what you’re sending to , say .pdf, then change it back and see if it opens okay. Then send it with the wrong extension and see if that works. That all sounds like it might be against company policy though. (Because you are actively evading the mail nanny instead of just trying to avoid sending whatever’s triggering it.)
We have them. We keep changing them. I have access to two of them. Of course one of them is the approved tool to be used by folks in one part of the company, and the other tool is to be used by folks in another part of the company…and the last time I checked, the tool to be used by one part of the company was blocked by the other part of the company.
(There was an international acquisition… Harmonizing certain IT things has not been a high priority because not many people are impacted by them. I, however, am one of the “not many people”. In fairness, they’ve done an amazing job of integrating the things that needed integrating, and my situation is fairly unique within the company.)
I imagine that tomorrow I will be getting a message about what the One True Solution du jour is, and that will take care of my issue. It’s just frustrating in the short term.
EDIT: I should also mention, in fairness, that part of the problem is that other than vendor support questions, I have no real need to do file sharing outside the company, and because of my unique situation, I sometimes miss/get missed on certain announcements or updates through the grapevine. Still…I’m feeling rather protective of my red Swingline stapler.
This is sort of baffling to me. Carpets in general are pretty gross no matter how clean you think they might be. If you have a dog, it is completely hopeless situation. None of that seems compatible with OCD.
Good luck!
I am like 99% certain a consultant we used a few years ago is currently running demos across the industry using a dataset from a project I worked on with them. They left enough of a trail in their recent demo that I was able to recognize it.
There shouldn’t be anything particularly useful anyone could get out of it, and I might be the only one that could possibly make the connection back to it, but it still annoys me that there was even that trace left in it.
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You can’t ask them about it?
Because I’m annoyed? Doesn’t feel like it would achieve much.
I don’t think they did anything wrong other than not remove every trace of anything i could possibly recognize.
If I was the consultant, I would want to know so I could remove any recognizable trail, even if you were the only one who could recognize it.
I wouldn’t want to know, if it meant I found out by being told off, or even if you sounded noticeably annoyed when you told me, so there is that.
But a polite email saying something like “hey, I noticed that it looks like your demo contains my data, and am worried it might be noticeable even though it probably isn’t, do you think it could be modified a little more if it is my data?” I’d probably do exactly as suggested in that case.
YMMV, I can only speak for how I would react, and I seem to react very differently to things than how most people would react. 
Fair enough. Let’s say it was annoying enough that i created a post on this thread and that was about it.
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Jesus.
An acquaintance of mine who is anti-vax, essential-oil-consuming, anti-GMO, etc. is becoming a doula accepting Medicaid in my state.
I looked up the requirements, and you can accept Medicaid for doula services in my state after taking a 16-hour training class with no other medical experience.
My daughter is a doula, no other medical training.
No idea how (if) she gets paid, but seems like a luxury service more than a medical necessity
As long as she tells people to take prenatals
Delta no longer has the snack mix. I heard it explained as “people complained it was too salty.”
well, F those guys and tell them to get the cookies, cheese-its and sun chips then. leave me and my salt addiction alone!
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I had someone steal a small piece of my work once. Not enough to be worth making a fuss over, but enough for me to still talk shit about them from time to time.