The pressroom manager at work — Steve — has been having trouble with some of the night & weekend shift guys getting on his computer and playing games & whatnot, and generally making a mess of his desk by getting ink on his stuff, so he came to me a couple of weeks ago for some help with an idea… He wanted to put up a dummy camera in his office pointed at his desk to deter some of the stuff that was going on. I told him he’d have better luck keeping them off his computer if he just changed his password & kept it a secret, but he was wanting to also keep them away from his desk. So I tracked one down (much easier and cheaper than I thought it would be) and installed it yesterday. The reaction thus far has been pretty amusing, and a bit surprising.
The camera arrived on the perfect day, coinciding with some employee meetings that were going on, so I did the installation while the night shift guys were in their meeting. I made a point of walking past the room where they were meeting carrying a ladder and a roll of cable. The job of installing it was completed well before the meeting was done, and it didn’t take long before they noticed the camera and its blinking red light. And reacted.
The pressroom manager got a call from one of the guys last night, mad as a hornet… “What the (insert expletive) is going on with all the (insert expletive) cameras around here?!?! We feel like we’re being watched!!!” He calmly responded that it’s one camera, and it’s not intended or being used to watch anything but his desk. Today, things were tense all over; people were upset that they were being “watched”. That the camera was evidence that they weren’t trusted. The truth of the matter is that his reaction was evidence that things were going on that shouldn’t, and he feared the camera’s presence would give him away.
The funny thing is not only that the camera is a dummy, but that for the last three years we’ve been running an iPrism web filter device that keeps tabs on every excursion to the Internet, tracking the sites everybody on the network visits and how long they spend on them. Everyone was informed of the iPrism’s presence and function when it was installed, and the pressroom people are reminded of its presence any time they try to get to the Internet from a non-authorized computer. Even if the camera was real and was really watching that one desk, their online activities are actually being “watched” and scrutinized more thoroughly by the iPrism. Yet because they see the camera and don’t see the iPrism, the camera is the problem. And that phony camera will probably keep them in line far better than the iPrism ever will.
Steve is getting a good laugh out of it the whole situation. A few people around the company know it’s a dummy, so I’m not sure how long the secret will last. I’m sure he’ll milk it for all it’s worth though.
Day-later update: God has a great sense of humor, and timing. I wrote that yesterday, then today’s devotional in Our Daily Bread had to do with the very same thing:
Someone shared with me her observation about two bosses. One is loved but not feared by his subordinates. Because they love their boss but don’t respect his authority, they don’t follow his guidelines. The other boss is both feared and loved by those who serve under him, and their good behavior shows it.
That’s pretty telling of the atmosphere at work; very relaxed, almost too relaxed at times, which leads to low productivity levels. Steve stopped by my desk this morning and said that press output jumped considerably in the last couple of days. If one dummy camera can do that, he’s wondering where he might put a second one, just for good measure. Amazing what a newfound fear of the boss can do for people.
