You know those little techno-gadgets for IT folks, who work in high tech jobs or for bosses who want to pretend to be high tech, that have the numerical password sync’d up to a computer somewhere tied to your user name and the password changes every minute so it’s practically unhackable? We have those at the hospital, which I sometimes think is a little much but I suppose in this day and age of patient confidentiality and electronic medical records, it’s a good thing. I mean, you always hear about banks and cell phone companies having thousands of client records at risk to identity theft; even the government can’t seem to keep their personnel info a secret. However, I haven’t heard much about hospitals getting hacked. It probably has something to do with the fifteen times I have to log in whenever I need to log in from a remote computer…and the SecurID.
I only ever have to log in remotely when I’m on-call and there’s a problem and I share the on-call rotation with my Integration peers. So, it’s not like it’s a big deal every day or night. However, it does seem to hit at night, mostly when it’s my turn for some reason. I don’t know why.
After I got paged at 3am in the wee hours of Sunday morning, I guess Pugly decided to take matters into his own hands -er- paws — well, really, his mouth. I guess I left my SecurID sitting a little too accessible on the desk and I guess it looked a little too much like something new and chewable. When I dragged myself out of bed in the morning, the back of the SecurID had been wrenched off by Pug teeth to reveal the tiny motherboard inside and the little monitor which had once counted down the seconds between each password switch, now looked as if digital ink had overrun and filled the space. The whole thing was horribly mangled.
The sad part was that it had been abandoned and no amount of showing it to Pugly and telling him that he’d been naughty would make him understand what he’d done wrong.
Especially at 3am the next morning when I was paged again; only that time I had to drive into the city 40 minutes to look at the interfaces to tell everyone that nothing was wrong.
But I did make Pugly ride with me as punishment.
He thought it was a great adventure.
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Okay, so I have to admit that I laughed when I read this story. And I know that it’s NOT FUN getting up at 3am to drive into the office. But, poor Pugly. He thought that he had found a new toy…
Well, sure, it’s funny now…
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