[jeffmould]

Back in the early 90s I had a summer internship for a contractor at Goddard Space Flight Center. My job for the entire summer was to track down and inventory a list of 1000s of devices across the entire campus. At the time they were building a tracking database for all the devices on the campus.

The printout I was handed on my first day had not been updated in several years. It basically contained a tracking ID, what building/room the device was supposedly located, and who it was assigned to.

I spent every day walking building to building, room to room, interviewing employees, trying to track down devices. I never finished updating the list simply because I was never able to track down over half the devices. Outside of a few secure areas I did not have access to, I pretty much turned the campus upside down looking for devices. I can only imagine where all those devices ended up.

[cbsks]

I interned at Goddard in 2006 and my PI had a rogue wireless access point for his interns to use. Apparently it was a long and convoluted process to get network access for personal computers, so he didn’t even bother trying. I remember some of my fellow interns complaining about having to work offline for the first month of their 10 week internship.

[dvtrn]

it was a long and convoluted process to get network access for personal computers, so he didn’t even bother trying

"When people can't work with you, they will look for ways to work around you". - former IT boss of mine.

Every time.

[ryandrake]

Another fellow Goddard intern checking in! But mine was back before anyone worried about “working offline” vs. “working online”. We just wrote our code—without needing to browse HN and StackOverflow every 10 minutes :-) We still had plenty of other non-Internet related red tape, bureaucracy, and other forms of Work Prevention to overcome and avoid though.

[lozaning]

Im having flashbacks to when i had a similar job at IBM back in the day, and we "lost" a z990 system. There was considerable more understanding when I couldn't find a blade server the size of a hardback book than when i couldn't find a machine the size of a car. Thankfully it showed up in Beaverton like 3 months later.

Im still bitter about their ITCS 300 policies that dictated I couldn't have access to the LOM of the blades to enable the beacon light for identification. Nothing like walking through multiple 8,000 sft server rooms looking for 1 server among thousands.