Weekly News Update

12 Comments

1. My firm is also cutting off personal email accounts. I’m really distressed – because I work so much, I do much of my personal “business” (i.e., coordinating plans with spouse, applying to preschools, etc.) from my work laptop. I still find that I can’t think straight on mobile email – I need a real keyboard to write serious emails. Any suggestions?

   1. I have a bluetooth keyboard I bought at Amazon for my iPad, but discovered on a plane flight that it works just as well with my iphone. (Better for the tiny airplane tray.)

   2. One option,which my husband has resorted to since his law firm took away personal email, Facebook, etc., is to get an iPad and a detachable keyboard, which makes typing much easier. Another option, which is what I do, is to type the substantive email in at my work email, and then email them to my private email or save them as a draft, and then send thru my personal email on my phone via copy and paste. I also use my phone’s dictation program, which is okay but not amazing.

      1. +1 I have typed out emails on my work email and forwarded them to myself. Obviously make sure whatever you are sending is something you would be fine with other people (the IT department, your boss, etc.) reading.

   3. I worked for a company that blocked all personal email accounts, Facebook, Youtube, most streaming music and a variety of other s!tes based off of whitelists and blacklists, and we weren’t allowed to use the company WiFi on our personal devices either. Flash drives were banned and only worked as read-only on our desk computers, unless you got a “official” flashdrive that was signed out to you by IT – and that took pulling teeth, 3 levels of management signatures and practically signing over your firstborn. Technically, we weren’t even allowed to plug our personal phones into the USB ports on our computers to charge them, although that rule wasn’t really enforced. Everyone used tons of data on their phones to get through dealing with personal stuff, and since our building was built like a fortress the cell signal was really weak and my phone need to be charged by noon even if I wasn’t using it at all and had data turned off. We couldn’t send emails with attachments to gmail or other free email addresses, and if you tried to send an attachment to a customer or vendor with an attachment there was a form that popped up where you had to fill in the “business reason” for sending that file – and IT/corporate compliance did in fact read those forms, as we found out when one of my co-workers filled in something snarky. The only loophole on how to get work home if you didn’t have a corporate laptop (and most of us didn’t) was to email it to yourself (work email to work email), then login to the webmail system at home and download the attachment, then email it back to work when you were done.

      Luckily, someone had convinced IT to allow google calendars, but that was the only thing that was allowed – no gmail, no google docs/drive, no dropbox, etc. If they hadn’t allowed google calendars I’m pretty sure my life would have devolved to complete chaos since I live and die by them.

      And then we’d get messages “gently reminding” us not to use corporate email for personal purposes. If I can’t check my gmail for 12 hours, you’d better bet I’m going to email my kid’s teacher using my personal email or my husband and tell him I’m going to be late coming home.

      I understand that company had genuine corporate IP issues (there was a major scandal involving someone stealing tons of data and intellectual property to sell to a competitor in China), but it was such a pain to be treated like an idiot and person who could not be trusted all the time.

      1. Meg, I’m in banking and I have had all of those rules in some form or another at the last three banks. No personal email, no facebook, no streaming music, no flash drives. It’s just normal life for me now – life behind the firewall. In the banks’ situation, privacy laws and fallout are the reason that the rules are in place and we pretty much accept it. Though we do get to use our phones as much as we want. I have always send myself emails and then forwarded them on my phone as it’s the best way around typing on a small screen.

         1. I understand the need for these rules in some cases, but it was just one more nail in the “why I thought I wanted to work for a mega-corporation but actually I don’t” coffin. If I had otherwise been happy there I probably could have dealt with my work-arounds with much more grace, but since I wasn’t it was just one more annoyance.

            Work arounds that I was able to use included gmail forwarding rules that sent me a text whenever I got an email from certain people (kid’s teacher, etc) or certain threads, and making use of apps/webpages that allowed me to push blocks of text to my phone and training people like my sister to call or text not email (or text with “I emailed you”). I built breaks into my day to read and respond to email on my phone – but it was so much less efficient to do that than to just let me use a real computer for 5 minutes so it was frustrating.

   4. I’m doing document review at a big firm and they’ve cut off personal email as well for everyone. I’ve just been dealing with things on my phone, but it isn’t ideal.

2. is the weekend open thread not opening for anyone else or just me? I tried safari and firefox. It says 16 comments but when i go to open it its a blank page

   1. I can open it on Chrome, but I’m thinking some tech trouble must be afoot. 16 comments seems way too low.

   2. I was having that issue intermittently with IE earlier.

   3. I was having the same problem using Chrome. I can see it on my iPhone (Safari).

Comments are closed.