5 Reasons Why Not to Use Your Work Computer to Do Your Personal Taxes

Posted on February 7, 2017 by Jeffrey Gifford
  1. You don’t have local admin.
    TurboTax requires1 it and you probably don’t have it, nor should you.
    Admins take away local admin because users frequently don’t look before clicking and because users install things they shouldn’t, possibly introducing malware or putting their organizations at risk of license violations.
  2. You just saved, on a device you don’t own, your sensitive personal information.
    Enough of your (and your family’s) sensitive personal information2 that even a mildly competent criminal would find it easy to exploit. And you saved it for them all in one spot. With pointers to it.
    There are methods to encrypt this file and make it harder for them to exploit it. But it’s still possible.
    Oh, and that PDF you saved, just in case? It has everything the criminal needs, too.
  3. You don’t have a reasonable expectation of privacy when using their computer.3
    Check your company handbook, HR manual or whatever you signed. It might even be stated that simply.
  4. Your tax return has now left your control and been copied to your company’s backup system.
    That might be onsite at your corporate offices, it might be “in the cloud” somewhere, it might be on tapes that your admin takes home on the weekends. Wherever it has gone, it’s probably well-protected,4 but it’s now been replicated to multiple places and will probably never truly be erased.
    By design, at least, it will be around for years, perhaps long after you’ve moved on.
  5. You don’t own that computer. (Or its contents.) And you probably can’t take it with you.
    Some employers will let you collect “your” files when you move on, but many will walk you right out the door. Sometimes we leave on our own terms and other times we don’t. With the median number of tenure years just over four,5 why risk putting your data on your employer’s gear?
    (And you didn’t use your company’s email address to register the software, did you?)

What should you do instead?

  1. Use your own computer.
  2. Use TurboTax’s online edition.
  3. Sign up for a Gmail account.6
  4. Sharpen your pencil.

Any other thoughts?

  1. See “Administrator Rights In Windows 7 And Vista – Turbotax Support“. Web. 8 Feb. 2017. ↩
  2. See  NIST’s “Guide to Protecting the Confidentiality of Personally Identifiable Information (PII)” (pdf). Web. 8 Feb. 2017. ↩
  3. In all fairness to your busy admins, there aren’t enough hours in the day to go looking for this stuff just for fun. But there are applications that scan for these bits of sensitive personal information periodically and flag it as part of your company’s privacy program. And they work. ↩
  4. That’s one of the reasons admins do backups—to provide protection for the company’s assets. ↩
  5. See U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ “Employee Tenure in 2016“. Web. 8 Feb 2017. ↩
  6. Gmail is reported to still have lots of addresses. ↩
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Know when to STOP

Posted on August 16, 2016 by Jeffrey Gifford

After a frustrating day at work dealing with a repeat of a problem from this past spring, I related some of the situation to my crew of hecklers advisers at the dinner table:

Stop Sign in Australia

By Matthew Paul Argall [CC0]

A software package common to all our endpoints has a third-party plugin that only half of our users utilize. The package incorporates some templates that—in our situation—were created in a different version of the package on quite a different platform. The package and plugin relationship is complicated: only a particular version of the plugin will work with any given version of the package.

Of the users that utilize the plugin, only a few are in the same workgroup with another user. And, of course, there’s not a user group or a communication mechanism. The only common point of contact is the workgroup that takes the output from this package and does some massaging, formatting and editing before sending back to the users.

The IT workers on my team started with each user of the software package and plugin—and blaming the templates. Or the packages. Or the plugins. (Or the users!) Very soon we had a mashup of instructions with every known mixture of package/plugin/installation possible. I was hearing things like “UserA says that it’s the templates” and “UserB says when they reboot it works” and “UserC deleted their cache, reinstalled the plugin and now it works”.

Whatever. Sure, keep developing individual solutions for each of your installations. How’s that working for you?

Continue reading →

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Sharing the vision

Posted on August 5, 2016 by Jeffrey Gifford

A Leader “shares the vision” with the Team

We spent a good part of a day at the GCC National Youth Leadership Training course last week talking about “Sharing the Vision”.

There was so much presented throughout the week that I doubt many of the 48 participants got more than a high-level introduction to this topic, but it was one of the ideas that struck me pretty hard.

Here’s what I took away from that afternoon. Continue reading →

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More thoughts on the stages of Team Development

Posted on August 2, 2016 by Jeffrey Gifford

From my 2016 NYLT notes:

Day 3

Adults frequently try to start at Performing while still actively Norming. So when Storming hits, it can be quite explosive.

 

Team individuals (vs true team members) who are accomplished (practiced? mature? aware?) at being team members can navigate these stages faster than those with less experience being on teams.

Navigate, but not always completing the stages. Not fully transformed to the stage.

(Actors with really good script writers can do this well, too.)

 

[One] role of the Leader is to guide the team through [the stages of team development] quickly and sufficiently [for the situation]. Not always thoroughly, but sufficiently.

A short-lived team doesn’t need to be completely stormed out. Masking conflict (for a time) can be acceptable.

 

Introspection can help move the individual along, but it’s largely masking the true stage or growth/progression of the individual.

 

The whole team needs to reach the [Storming phase], together. Otherwise, there are cells of quiet, with flare ups all around.

Read an early post on the Stages of Team Development. More than five years later I find that it still holds up well, but could use an update.

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You’re sick, never mind the details…

Posted on February 11, 2014 by Jeffrey Gifford
Rod of Alsclepius, from Wikipedia

Rod of Alsclepius, from Wikipedia

As a manager, I occasionally hear variations on the “I’m sick and not coming in today” statement from my employees. Sometimes it’s a simple cold, other times it’s not.

Sometimes it comes with much too much information.

I’m not sure if it’s a need to prove that they’re really sick, that they’re not slacking off at home binge-watching Sherlock, or if it’s some form of exhibitionism.

I used to tell my employees I didn’t want to know. But they told me anyway. So now I skip that and just nod, express whatever awkward sentiment seems appropriate and let them know I wish them the speediest recovery.

Once in a rare while, it becomes important that I’m told. Those chronic things that start impacting performance. That’s when it’s very important because I can then refer my employee to  Continue reading →

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Vendors: Superheroes or Villains?

Posted on August 8, 2013 by Jeffrey Gifford
Super Hero Flying

Superhero or Villain? (from OpenClipArt.org)

As the lead IT guy in a small engineering firm, I get to deal with a lot of vendors. Vendors fill in my gaps: things like knowledge, skills, tools, hours and expertise. Really good vendors become my partners, my superheroes.

I have a rule of thumb about vendors—I just about always call them back. As distasteful as it can be to talk to a salesperson (if you’re a vendor or salesperson and that offends you or you don’t understand, just quit your job now), I call them back. Vendors and salespeople are in the business of selling stuff but some employ tactics that I just don’t enjoy.
Continue reading →

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Posted on June 15, 2013 by Jeffrey Gifford | Leave a comment

Classical or Jazz?

Posted on October 16, 2012 by Jeffrey Gifford
Classical? Jazz.

Musician?

I have long wanted to write a post on leadership using elements from Chain of Command, a pair of episodes from the Star Trek: The Next Generation series, but have struggled on where to start1—there’s just so much material to choose from.

One of the central conflicts of the story is how (and by whom) Captain Picard is replaced as captain of the Enterprise. Even before the change of command takes place, Captain Edward Jellico lists a series of orders, changing the Enterprise and how it functions in several significant, even dramatic ways. There’s no discussion, no explanation, no time for a period of adjustment, just his curt (and unfriendly) “get it done”.

Here’s where we could get distracted from this post’s topic. We could cover how Jellico’s assignment throws the Enterprise back into a Storming stage of team formation, how Picard graciously and effectively becomes a follower when necessary, how Jellico was effective despite his run-ins with the crew or a half-dozen other leadership topics of note.

But I want to focus on a single scene, a single pair of words. Continue reading →

  1. And in some sense, where to end. ↩
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Why? — a short follow-up

Posted on August 9, 2012 by Jeffrey Gifford
5 whys

Asking “Why?” a number of times can help lead to a problem’s root cause

I successfully finished a ISO 9001 class last week on being a lead auditor and during the training was reminded of an easy technique for getting to the root cause of some types of problems we face, including as systems administrators.

Related to another post a while back, the idea is to explore the reasons for an outage or a problem by asking “Why?” a number of times (five appears to be a good number), usually focusing on a process that failed (or doesn’t exist). Continue reading →

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On Walking as a Leadership Trait

Posted on July 8, 2012 by Jeffrey Gifford
Walking Stick Figure

A walking stick figure, the letter “N” from Nancy Blackett’s Semaphore Font

One of my favorite leaders during my time at KeyCorp was a walker. He’d catch us early in the morning as he walked around the 6th floor. There were certainly faster or shorter ways to get to his office, but he’d take a little bit longer route in the morning just to see what was going on.

He wasn’t spying on us or checking up on us, just walking around. Most of the time he didn’t even stop and chat, just smiled, said “good morning” and walked the aisles to his office.

Occasionally he’d bring something up, but more frequently, we’d flag him down and give him an update on something, a problem or solution we’d been working on that we knew he’d be interested in. Continue reading →

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