I have updated my résumé online and downloadable as a PDF file

This is the French version as I’m currently looking for work here. If you have any ideas, please tell me. If you have any connections, please feel free to pass on the URL. If you see any faults… Oops! Please let me know.

Went into the office today. That sounds like fun, doesn’t it…

In fact, MB and Hubby are in Copenhagen at a professional conference. As I have heard them blithly massacring english and understanding everything backwards I imagine everyone is having fun, and if tomorrow Denmark breaks off all diplomatic relations with France, well, we shall know why…

I had gone in to see Colleague Opposite who got back from Madagascar to find the desk opposite vacant. I wanted to thank him as he had brought me back postcards of Lemurs. Friendly advice: do not get me started on the subject of Lemurs.

Colleague Opposite was orange. He was not orange before he left, by the way. The sun, sea and whatever else there had bleached his hair and beard orange, brought out freckles and tinted his skin orange [well, all that was visible… a aspirin-white band flashed out from time to time from the sleeve of his t-shirt, so—wisely—he didn’t go topless]. Quite a surprise. He also looked quite relaxed. I was probably green. With envy.

I offered my apologies for disappearing like I did, and leaving the new site in such a state. He generously said that he would have done exactly the same thing, and I was not to blame nor to worry. He also said that he had repeated to MB that the work that I had been doing was way over his head and that he had neither the time nor the capacity to finish it. And so he told me that since then, MB has been wandering around the agency repeating to herself as well as to anyone she meets, that the site is fine as it is and there is absolutely no need to change it. So why then did we waste about 6 man months [person months?] working on this, revising all the indexing to integrate her dumb themes and categories, wasting days in meetings and dummies and me coding for months… Let me guess… It was to create work in order to keep me on and avoid firing me… Of course! Why didn’t I think of that.

We ate at the local Indian chippy, drinking Indian Kingfisher beer—it was all very pleasant—and thanks are due to Colleague Opposite for inviting me. I just hope that I will be inviting him out soon, in order to celebrate a happy event for him. And then we’ll all be laughing.

When I started work at The Place That Shall Not Be Named my Colleague Opposite indicated that there was a large hard drive with filesharing on, on C’s hard drive. This was the place where people stored mp3s. Staff brought in CDs, ripped them, and streamed the music to a player on their local machine. As I was working on a Mac I didn’t bother, I listened to the radio on iTunes most of the time.

Now fast forward a year and bear with me while I explain a rather annoying and intricate detail.

Most serious companies where IT is important have an IT charter. This document sets out what you and the company can and cannot do on the computers that the company provides. For example, you agree not to spread virii in your spare time, and the company agrees not to spy on your private mail; that sort of thing. However, in France, in the absence of such a charter, jurisprudence provides that a computer is a ‘private place’, in the same way that, for example, a locker or a drawer is. An employer, for the better or the worse, may not search a ‘private place’ if the employee [or someone representing the employee] is not present. Now I pointed this out to MB and Hubby when I arrived but, as ever, they reacted by saying that they didn’t need such things [an IT charter] in their company.

One weekend Hubby decided to examine C’s computer and came across the hard drive containing the mp3s. All 4 GB of them, all organised by artist/disk/title, just like the ripping software allow you to do. Hubby went through the ceiling.

He imagined that:
1 – C spent all her days downloading and organising the material instead of working. To that end he prepared charts in Excel* based on his calculations of an average download-and-organise time in order to show that she had been spending all her time for the past year doing only this. Of course, he is incapable of understanding that the computer can rip while it is doing something else because he personally has no multitasking capability, and that the software is perfectly capable of naming and filing the material without the need to do anything else.
[*Question: What is worse than an idiot? Answer: An idiot with Excel. Question: What is worse than an idiot with Excel? Answer: An idiot with MS Access… ]

2 – all of this were downloaded mp3s and thus ‘illegal’. I put ‘illegal’ in inverted commas as I have hundreds of downloaded mp3s that are downloaded legally from musicians’ sites and music discovery services. Possessing a mp3-encoded music file for which you possess the disk is of course, perfectly legal. Possessing a mp3-encoded music file where you have the permission from the artist and any other rights holders to download is also perfectly legal. But for Hubby, the company IT specialist, the equation was simple: mp3s = illegal filesharing.

3 – that this was company material that was being misued. In fact Colleague Opposite had bought the disk for the purpose of containing ripped files. It wasn’t declared as such, but it was he who set this up.

4 – that this was hidden. In fact, as I noted, everyone knew of it.

So MB did what any reasonable person would do. She called in a Public Notary to provide witness that Hubby had found the files on C’s machine. And she sent a registered letter to C informing her of her instant dismissal from the company. Following that, other machines were searched and Kazaa was found running on some. And some of the piggy-back spyware that lives on Kazaa.

Come Monday morning we were all invited into MB’s office in two groups, which she named, in front of us, the ‘conspirators’ group and the ‘nothing to worry about’ group. The first were given a bollocking, the second of which I was part, were informed of the ‘facts’ and told we had nothing to worry about. Personally I asked to be allowed to leave the group in order to give my reactions to the information later in private not wanting to embarass and contradict MB and Hubby in front of other staff. MB refused and asked that I speak.

So I said that:
1 – in April of the previous year I had advised them to ban Kazaa. I did not talk about file-sharing, for me that was a private matter for each person’s conscience, however Kazaa ate a lot of bandwidth and the spyware that piggy-backed on the system made the machines unstable. [Not as unstable as the cheapo-cheapo hard drives that Hubby installed in the machines and which crashed—losing unbacked-up data—with unsurprising regularity. When I arrived I asked what the backup policy was. I was told that all was under order. Yep. All was under order, the data bases were backed up but that was all. It took a year to get a reasonable off-site backup policy implemented for all the servers, and there was still no policy for individual machines…]
Hubby had decided then that Kazza wasn’t a problem [because he’d never heard of it…].

2 – I had also proposed then that they put together a charter to cover this activity. They had poo-pooed the idea.

3 – that in the absence of said charter their messing about in people’s machines over the weekend was an intrusion in their employees private lives and that any material gathered in that way would be looked on with suspicion.

4 – that there was nothing illegal about ripping music files for private use, nor in streaming music from one computer to another provided that the files were not copied in the process. [They informed us that they contacted a lawyer who worked for the French Music Industry Rights Protection Agency, an organisation that like its American counterpart wants to see filesharing made illegal, and wants to block the legal right to copy music that you have aquired legally. A neutral third-party then… And this lawyer informed them that the copying of files onto the computer was in fact an ilegal operation. As it is clear that MB and Hubby had no understanding of what happened, I question there capacity to explain clearly to said lawyer—whatever his agenda—and it is not at all certain that they understood the answer either: lawyers rarely give straight black and white answers…].

5 – that if C was ‘guilty’ of anything then I was also ‘guilty’, and that the practise of dividing the employees into groups of ‘nice, good children’ and ‘nasty, naughty children’ was ridiculous.

MB and Hubby were also shouted at by their accountant who told them they were just covering themselves with ridicule. They withdraw the dismissal notice to C [who negociated her departure anyway, arguing that she had lost confidence in her bosses—ahem—and they paid her about 6 months’ salary over the odds just to get off the hook.] Colleague Opposite received an unjustified and disagreable ‘warning’ letter and we promptly wasted about three months fighting an extremely repressive and badly worded IT charter that basically gave the employers the right to do what they wanted, and the employees extreme and unrealisable responsabilties under penalty of being sacked if they even coughed. While proposing a decent charter that laid out clearly not only mutual and compatible rights and responsabilities, I also told them that it would be a good idea if they trusted their employees a little, as so far it had been the employees who had acted the most intelligently.

We heard nothing more of the charter which is both a good and bad thing.

But typical of MB and Hubby.

Oh, and I got the sack. Pure coincidence.