So I used to work for this big company

So I used to work for this big company.

I can't tell you what they did, because of the agreement I signed when I left, but let's just say that they had some pretty cool gear, and some very rigidly enforced policies when it came to using it.

Like these cool boxes made out of kelvar-reinforced steel, or some freaking stuff like that. Any secure "component" had to be kept in one if you weren't working on it, and I mean literally holding the component in your hands. Going to lunch? In the box it went. Getting a glass of water from the cooler? In the box. Stepping out of your cube into Jackson's cube next door to borrow a pen? Box. In theory putting the item down to take a bite from your snickers bar should involve the box as well, but I heard they let that one slide after one of the head engineers had kicked up a stink back a couple of years before I joined.

The boxes had become ubiquitous by the time I started there, and were actually being used for practically anything that some manager had decreed needed keeping secure. I heard that it all started in Legal for all their contracts and whatnot, which kind of made sense I guess, and then the VP level started using them for planning documents and other "forward-looking" material. When I joined everyone was using them.

The boxes themselves were pretty interesting; they locked electronically, and there were two buttons on top marked "lock" and "unlock". And here's where the madness you only find in big companies (or maybe the government) comes in. The boxes could only be unlocked by the person who locked them. Biometrics or something I think. If you locked a box and then handed it to someone else and they hit the unlock button, sirens would go off and the floor would be evacuated. I'm not kidding - it really worked that way. Someone would do it every couple of months (invariably a new intern - it's a mistake you only made once). Happened slightly more often than the fire drills from memory.

Now this was a monumental pain as you can imagine. Sometimes you'd lock a component in a box to take to a co-worker (that was one of the rules), and he'd be away from his workstation, so you'd put a note on it saying this was the frobnicator he'd asked you for in email. Then he'd come back from lunch or whatever, and have to bring the box back to your cube and get you to press the unlock button. Sometimes you'd happen be away in turn, and then the guy could wait for you, or take the box away again and try you again later, or leave the box with another note asking you to take it back to him again when you got back, and so on. Now imagine a team working on a complex section that involved hundreds of components that each depended on other, needed testing in groups, and finally were all assembled before the whole thing was shipped off in a damn jumbo box for its testing, integration with other sections etc etc. It was a nightmare.

It was worst in the evening - some people worked on their components late to wrap a task up, and then would deliver a locked box, hopefully with a note, to the next engineer that needed them and go home. The other engineer would come in in the morning and find half a dozen boxes, and start the morning ritual of finding each person in turn to unlock the boxes so he could start his work for the day.

Once when I was there, one of the engineers just left at the end of the day and never came back. He left his cube with three components locked away in their boxes, and that was that. A request went all the way to the VP of Security, but locking policy was final. Immutable. I suspect those boxes are somewhere in storage still, locked to this day. Most of the section had to be started again, as the testing had been done with those locked components, and everything had been adjusted to their tolerances, and you couldn't somehow make a shaft half a micron wider again after it had been precisely fitted to the locked one. It put our schedule back almost a month, and I heard that the guys manager was nearly fired over the debacle. But the Policy did not change. The Policy was written in stone.

That kind of thing obviously happened enough (or maybe was just considered a large enough threat) that eventually something was done. In our area (and I think in everyone's areas) they hired a manager for a new position, something along the lines of "Director of Group Process Security Management", but everyone just called him the "Lock Manager". New software was rolled out that allowed you to make a request to the Lock Manager to ask that your box be locked or unlocked, and they hired these young guys to actually go between cubes pressing the lock and unlock buttons. (The manager didn't do it of course, as he was a manager, and now that I think about it, I think that the software just sent the request directly to the guys themselves. But there was a manager. And he did have a corner office.)

And the system worked. I mean it was insane, and must have cost a fortune, and you couldn't just hit the lock buttons on the four boxes you had in your cube and go to lunch. No, you'd request that they be locked, and five minutes later a guy would come over the hit the buttons for you. Then you could go to lunch. But it worked, and the Policy was adhered to. All hail the Policy.

The morning ritual was also removed - you'd get to your cube and find a couple of boxes that someone had dropped off late the night before, and you'd just fire off a couple of requests, drink your coffee, and bingo, along would come a guy to unlock the boxes for you (or two guys - it depended on exactly who had locked the boxes for the engineers working late).

And I can see what you're thinking - and yes, they paid these guys some kind of insane overtime rate to ensure that they were in the office before the first engineer arrived, and only left after the last engineer did. I guess it didn't matter if they spent a few weeks around deadlines with practically zero sleep, as you don't really need to that alert to simply press a button. And one of the guys showed up at work with a Porsche after about a year, so I guess it was worth it to them, financially-speaking.

What if one of them quit? I don't even want to think about it, but it didn't happen while I was there. I guess the VP of Security had a contingency plan. Securely locked in a box, I imagine.

Big companies huh...