Bear with me as I ramble a bit. My very first job out of college was in the engineering department of an automotive supplier. While I was responsible for the new fangled CAD stuff we still did a lot of work with pencil and paper back then. My office opened up into the “bull pen”, a large room filled with long tables that the drafstpeople sat at. In the auto industry they are called “designers”. These people lived by their drawing tools: splines, weights, velum, and pencils. Being the peripatetic engineer that I was I found that I constantly lost my pencils and had to go searching for one or go to the supply cabinet for a fresh box. I developed a theory that if I left enough pencils everywhere I went that eventually there would always be one ready to hand when I had to mark up a drawing or sign a release document. That never worked. One day I was talking to a designer, Murphy, and he got up to get something from his desk drawer. He opened the long middle drawer and my jaw dropped when I saw that it was filled with pencil stubs. And I mean filled. He had trouble closing the drawer there were so many pencils in there. It turns out that developing a hoarding instinct for writing instruments is an occupational hazard for people who live by them. I call it the Murphy Pencil Problem (MPP).
Does that syndrome exist in this modern day? Well, we all know people who used to download files, games, programs, and store them on thousands of floppy disks. One friend I have has a huge collection of DVD’s he has downloaded and burned. It is a gotta-have-it mentality.
arrested an IT worker from NRL the Navy and Marine Corps Naval Research Lab. After a call from his wife led them to his home they discovered over 19,000 items that he had stolen from the lab over the years. Prosecutors value his hoard of CDs, hard drives, floppy disks and zip drives at $1.6 million. Of course that valuation is ridiculous as old hard drives are pretty much worthless. But think of the data loss nightmare! Some guy suffering from Murphy’s Pencil Problem accumulates two decades worth of data storage from your organization containing who knows what kinds of confidential information. This could be a problem.
Now police have
It may take a while for the NRL to sort out just how big a problem they have. In the meantime let this incident serve as a reminder to get your asset tracking and physical security systems tuned up to catch this form of kleptomania.
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Quick update: In a more macabre story another computer thief, this one in the UK, was sentenced on Tuesday to 26 years in jail for murdering a co-worker who caught him in the act of stealing a laptop on a Saturday at the office.
