Writer’s Block from June 2, 2010:
Have you ever thought about using your job for “evil?” What types of things could you do in your current role to cause chaos or destruction? Besides getting fired, what’s stopping you?
Before my current position I was in human resources. With respect to the ability to cause chaos and destruction, what more do I have to say? I had access to thousands of social security numbers, salaries, home addresses and similar bits of personal data. Plus, being in benefits meant I often knew some personal things that an HR generalist might not.
My friends used to love listening to me talk about work. I was always careful to leave out identifying details but it’s still possible to tell entertaining stories. The funniest thing about all my stories is that, beyond de-identification, they were all true. Nobody can work in HR for long without coming to an intimate understanding of the aphorism, “truth is stranger than fiction.”
Oddly enough, though, I was never really tempted to wreak havoc with the information. In addition, there’s an interesting thing that happens when you have access to protected information on so many people. It all becomes a blur and you begin not to care.
My supervisors at Intuit have universally adopted skeptical expressions when I’ve mentioned that the only person whose salary I care about is myself. It’s true, though. When you work with other peoples’ salaries as long as I did, you learn not to draw comparisons with your own. It’s a defense mechanism; the alternative is to be upset practically all the time. I think this and similar mechanisms are why I never really had much of a temptation to misuse protected information.
With respect to my current position, I don’t have the same kind of ability to wreak havoc although I can certainly cause problems if I want to. I still have access to enough private information to commit identity theft and cause people all kinds of financial headaches. But the general I-don’t-care attitude that I developed while in HR has carried over. There’s little to no temptation.
It helps that I don’t particularly get a thrill out of causing problems for other people. I get angry and I’m not above revenge (as much as I would like to pretend I am). But I don’t enjoy even that. I definitely wouldn’t enjoy randomly causing problems.
If anything, it sometimes frightens me a little when I realize what I can do. Several days ago, I made an offhand reference in a Twitter post to a situation where I did an emergency page-out that affected three people who hadn’t expected to work that Saturday. I actually started to apologize to one of them; he refused to accept it and said that I’d done exactly what I was supposed to do. It still bothers me to think I have enough power to intrude into people’s off-hour lives though.
That being said, I’d do it again. I’ve never shrunk back from work needing doing. I’m just not tempted to make extra work by creating unnecessary chaos.