Desperately Seeking Disk Space

The new company perk for the employee who has it all

Several years ago, I taught a class at a company that will remain nameless. Its classroom setup was very nice, with the students' PCs in neat rows facing the instructor's console machine at the front. I could quickly flip from slides to Web sites that related to SQL and anything else I was talking about.

I was trying to think of a paper or book that had been published by the University of Nevada in Las Vegas. Instead of telling the class, "I'll look that up and get back to you," I did a quick Internet search that included the words "Las Vegas."

That was a mistake. Their overactive censor-ware caught the words "Las Vegas" and covered my screen with a warning in a red panel that told me all the terrible things that happen to employees who violate the company's Internet policy. It was obviously written by a lawyer or someone paid by the word - with bonuses for long words. Because I was using the projection monitor in front of the class, this message was also shown on the screen behind me.

The class started to laugh, and I realized what had happened. Then, I fell all over myself apologizing and trying to explain my innocent mistake. But the reason they were laughing was that this hypersensitive network nanny had also nailed everyone in the room for similar harmless searches. It was so ridiculous that nobody took it seriously. But nobody removed the software, either. I would guess that the legal department wanted to have some physical evidence that the company was not creating a "hostile work environment" in case anyone sued.

I told this story to a friend of mine a few years ago. He owned a small shop doing development work on what was even back then a small server. He said he would prefer his employees surf porno sites instead of what they were doing: downloading huge music files that ate up space on the server. "Another advantage," he continued, "is that people will shut down a porno site when someone else comes into their cube. But people listen to music with headsets, so you have no idea if they have a CD in their drive or if they are sucking it in on our high bandwidth!"

I don't think he was really serious about the pornography. It is hard to write code on top of nude pictures. His problem was that he felt strongly that the music was an aid to programmer productivity and did not want to get rid of it if another solution could be found to save the disk space. He also knew he could not cut off the Internet connections completely because people needed them to do their work.

Waiting until the server crashed because a program tried to use space that was not there anymore was obviously not an option. The immediate solution was to flush out the server's drives every weekend so that space never got to be a problem. But this was only a quick fix.

The next suggestion was that they add a CD maker of some kind to the network, so employees could archive whatever they were listening to at the time. This suggestion was made just before the Napster case went to court. That was the end of that suggestion. Nobody wanted to chance a lawsuit, a risk they faced even if they posted a company policy against reproducing copyrighted audio materials.

The final solution was to go to a local CD store and build a company audio library. A round of emails let everyone pick a few titles they liked, which avoided duplicate choices. The library started to take care of itself as people brought in old CDs for the collection.

My buddy has since closed his shop. When I emailed him about this column, he remarked that he was glad to be out of the business before streaming video got cheap and he would have had to buy a DVD library.

Today, I wonder if it would be worth the effort to set up a company music server on the network that could be piped via the company intranet to the workers without taking up space on the main machines. I know that airplanes are now using this method, without the benefit of a computer network. Maybe coming up with a solution is where I will make my fortune with a startup.