I may or may not have mentioned I work for the federal government. In truth, I suppose I should state I am in its employ; how much actual work I do is a matter of sometimes unkind speculation by the people for whom I may work (I don’t pay a lot of attention, which I’m sure you’ve noticed).
In the course of this summer past, the agency of the federal government which keeps the personnel records of (nearly) all its employees, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), announced it had been hacked. It was a news story and you may have encountered it.
It was a slightly larger news story in my house, along with millions of others’ for understandable reasons. My favorite part, assuming there’s a ‘good part’ in a car crash or a mudslide story, may have been how, eventually, the OPM revealed the hack had happened ‘sometime earlier’ (as in perhaps this century, because they didn’t really know) and had just been noticed.
That acknowledgment sounds to me a little bit like an airport spokesperson offering to assembled TV cameras that ‘technically aircraft are NOT allowed in the arrival lounge so, yes, you could consider this a crash’ without anyone ultimately admitting anything. With due respect to Jennifer Warnes (among others), I know a quibble when I hear one.
And since from a distance a smile and a grimace look sort of the same, let’s just say I smiled yesterday at work reading an email from the private company hired by OPM to monitor the records of federal employees watching out for any and all manifestations of identity fraud.
Brief aside: Those who know me know I am, all by myself, the best possible deterrent for anyone else pretending to be me since I am an asshat. I make NO apologies about that. I am merely acknowledging what everyone else has already found out. In essence, I discovered Columbus (Georgia, not Ohio).
Yep, had a note from the Sentinels of Cyber-Security, or whatever their name is this week. Telling me, unsurprisingly, no one had tried any shenanigans with my information and closed their report with this Pet Clark ‘Don’t Sleep in the Subway’ security tip, “Make sure to update your passwords across all of your online accounts regularly and choose safe password practices by including special characters and numbers.”
Considering the circumstances that created “our” relationship with one another, this is a bit like having a visit to the Betty Ford Clinic paid for by a grant from the Jack Daniels Foundation. I am not a fan of Kool-Aid per se, so asking me to pick a flavor isn’t going to do much to get and keep me invested unless I get to watch you do the drinking. Big sips, c’mon.
-bill kenny
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