"That can't be real?" Really? I'll never forget the description given to me by a close friend who had left a "Government IT" job for the private sector: (1) Y

"That can't be real?" Really? I'll never forget the description given to me by a close friend who had left a "Government IT" job for the private sector: (1) You have standards and practices like everywhere, but forget one and you're explaining yourself to a judge instead of a boss and (2) there's never enough money for doing all of the things required to meet regulations let alone make things better which is why you'll see silly things you haven't seen on banking websites in a decade still prominent as "security features" on state treasury websites. I found the story about "important data on a desktop drive", and the shock it caused, surprising. Maybe my past life (a decade ago in infrastructure) was unique, but I specifically recall an incident where I was called down to make an old IBM NetVista (mind you, Lenovo had owned that line for a while at this point) boot up[0]. I noticed some numbers on a printed label and a boot error about the CMOS battery, realized it was drive telemetry, realized that nobody who was looking at the problem had ever heard of plugging in those values (or probably had touched an IDE controller -- server guys -- and it was ancient technology). The rest of the story I might not have completely correct as parts of it are assembled third-hand, but this desktop was located in our data center, hooked up to a modem (2400bps) and it handled submitting charges to another carrier to the tune of "a few layoffs" for every week it wasn't functional. How does this happen? Well, the company went bankrupt and emerged, then was purchased by another company. During that time, a large part of our operations was moved from one state to another, hardware and all (but mostly not the people). This predates all of that, of course. At some point, a NetVista was put in place to test setting up an automated process for billing this carrier -- something carrier imposed (must have been one of the big guys). The developer who set up the test system was successful ... on his final week of work before being laid off. A few months later, the carrier continued working the migration plan and switched things over, and after a short delay, accounting rang the alarm bells. A busy developer stepped in, found the offending system was connected to test and re-configured it to point to prod. Everyone went on their day. And hey, when desktop migrated everyone to Windows XP, they put UPSes at every desk so it literally ran in a cubicle until the Data Center migration (where it failed the first time and the label was printed). Rather than figuring out what, on earth, it would take to fix it, they put it on a shelf and plugged it into the UPS in the rack until I was called several years later. [0] I was one of two people who were called when everything else was tried. This sort of incident happened to me in very similar ways at least 4 times (once with an old Thinkpad Laptop).