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While working for a former employer, my supervisor came to me one day, during my break time. I was relaxing with my then new HTC Apache smart-phone and reading an eBook. I am a well connected cyber-citizen, who likes to stay up-to-date with the latest gadgets. The smart-phone allows me to surf the Internet, to download, read and reply to my personal emails during my breaks without consuming my employer's bandwidth or breaking any internal IT rules.

The supervisor must have been having a bad day that day. She saw me using the smart-phone and promptly turned around and left the staffroom again, without saying a word. When I came back to my desk, there was an internal email waiting for me, which had been sent to all employees, stating that the use of personal computing devices on the premises of the company is henceforth prohibited. I sent off a quick email inquiring as to the reasoning behind this new edict. The explanation came back that personal laptops and smart-phones could be used to make a copy of the company's corporate client database. When I asked if there was a particular case of this having happened, I was told that it was a potential problem that the employer wished to avoid, and no actual cases had yet come to the attention of management.

In compliance with the new edict, I left my smart-phone at home the next day, but in my briefcase I carried a new notepad in preparation for a meeting that I had to attend later that day. Everybody in the office knows that I am a workaholic, and when the supervisor came around during break time and saw me at my desk furiously filling up pages of the notepad, I guess she must have presumed that I was preparing myself for the upcoming meeting. By the end of the 15 minute break I had filled 8 pages with information. I then stapled them, added a post-it note, and filed the stack of hand-written notes in the supervisor's in tray.

The papers contained the contact details for all of the company's key accounts, all neatly printed such that a good OCR program could have made sense of them. The post-it note simply asked that I be notified in advance of any edict banning the use of paper and pens in the office.

Why does it seem that, with the proliferation of high-tech solutions implemented in offices these days, that we have overlooked the simple, the old-fashioned, the tried-and-true technologies of yesteryear as no longer posing any threat? If someone really wanted to get to our client list, there are many low-tech ways of doing it. Technology in and of itself is not evil. A knife in a surgeon's hand can save a life. That same knife in a psychotic mass murderer's hands could take a life. Should we therefore ban knives?

Learn more about this author, Jed Kantos.
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