Being a huge company, we have a lot of pedantic rules that are supposedly enforced. One is that we have to keep our laptops inside lockable furniture overnight (so no one comes by with a saw and cuts through your day time cable lock). Our co-op student is using a laptop, but her office doesn’t have any furniture so I lent her my filing cabinet to lock her laptop in. This morning she came in and said she forgot my (only) key. Oops!

Well being a huge company, we have procedures in place to take care of this. We can make a facilities request for a new key and all our cabinets and closets have numbered locks so a key can be quickly mapped. I looked up my closet’s lock, called them, and told the woman on the phone that my lock number was 8622; to which she said that there were no locks in the building numbered over 4000!

Oops, ok maybe I screwed up, maybe it was 3622. I went and took a closer look; and it sure did look like 8622, so I said I was fairly certain that it was an 8. Anyways, she said she would come take a look, plus she had to unlock the filing cabinet. In the meantime, I went down to the co-op’s office and examined the lock on the cabinet again. It was there that I had an A-Ha! moment. If you looked at the number upside down, you could read it as 2298 (imagine 2s written like Ses). I was sure that was the screw up.

In the end it turns out that I was wrong. It was 3622. There goes my theory…

Posted by Kevin in Blogs Tags: IBM, working