Skip to main content

lost and found?

Joe: So...i lost my laptop...what now?
Admin: You LOST your laptop?
Joe: Umm..yea..I left it on the metro...the bag's gone now. I don't know what to do.
Admin: You LOST your laptop?
Joe: Well..i misplaced it.
Admin: Okay, well we don't get too many of these calls. I'll have to file a report. Contact your local computer group and they'll set you up with a temporary computer.
Over the next two hours, he got calls from upper management and the head of HR.
"There's confidential information in there. How could you lose it?'
Joe: "Well, I'm sorry. It won't happen again"
HR: "Yeah well it better not."
The firm went back and forth with him for an entire day, making him feel real guilty. Now there's a slide in every general firm presentation on laptop security.

Lost files are another issue. This happens once every few months, and the region gets a general email asking if anyone found these files.

The good thing is, with laptops...it is extremely encrypted and protected and all the information is backed up automatically in some general server. So a new laptop with all the previous information stored in a lost laptop can be up and running in a day.

But with files, that just sucks. Best we can do is lock it up in boxes. Ideally, everything should be electronic, but there's no way the old school will allow that to happen. Some firms do have everything electronically stored, so the retrieval process is much easier.

Good luck redoing all the work done on paper. For the few documents I've had to recreate, it sucks..it really does.
Labels:

Comments

Anonymous said…
Do they need to worry so much about a lost laptop? Apart from having to re-do work if you haven't backed files up to a remote location, the firm doesn't lose much, unless you have some papers with notes. Otherwise, they should just be glad if you didn't have paper copies in your laptop bag. The laptop itself can't be worth much in the big picture, because they're not exactly top-of-the-line anyway.
February 12, 2009 at 8:41 AM
notfordisplay said…
The lost laptop is not so much an issue for us as it is for our clients. There is sensitive information in there that can do a lot of damage if it's in an investor's hands, since it's not public information yet.
February 15, 2009 at 10:24 AM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

ADP/Payroll

Just realized that the very payroll/adp reports we all enjoyed looking at in order to see how much our client contacts made, now seem to piss me off. Especially when your main contact, who couldn't tell a debit from a credit, makes significantly more than you, and leaves at 5. It's almost guaranteed to get you in a foul mood and yak with your team about the ridiculous salaries that certain employees get when compared to yours.
36 comments
Read more

should you choose to audit financial services?

I'm trying to decide whether to audit financial services companies or non-financial services companies. What would you say are the pros and cons of either industries? Do individuals who choose non-FS have less career mobility within the firm or if they decide not to stay with the B4 after a few years? Really depends on what you'd like to do after (unless you really love auditing). If you want to a controller,etc. at a p/e firm or a hedge fund down the road, you'd want to go into financial services. The pay won't be too bad, especially if you get a share of the insane bonuses they dole out. If you want to audit industries with tangible products and want to get a better understanding of the operations of such businesses, then other industries are the way to go.In terms of mobility outside the firm, auditing other industries is the way to go since you have plenty of options when you exit the audit world. For example, in 2008, after Lehman collapsed, it was incredibly hard ...
47 comments
Read more

auditing vs consulting

I was wondering if you could break down the career opportunities in auditing and consulting (in a big 4). I know that consulting pays more in a big 4 and has more interesting work, but it seems that auditing has extremely good exit opportunities (Financial controller, CFO etc). Any thoughts on which is better in the long run? Well there's different consulting services offered by public accounting companies - the most popular being IT consulting and risk consulting. There are also other consulting services offered, but these two hire the most. Do they pay more? Yes, but not by much. Not enough for you to say: Shoot, the $$ is a huge reason for me to move over. Is the work more interesting than audit? Yes. You're actually looking over a company's processes and telling them what to do instead of what not to do (audit). Everyone I know who's made the switch likes it waay better than audit. In the long run though, choosing audit vs consulting really depends on what you want ...
66 comments
Read more