work follies

[cellio]

Today at work I found myself wondering: if I close a bug against a component that no longer exists, should I mark it "won't fix" or "works for me"? (I opted for the latter, so that the people who get email about a three-year-old bug might at least get a smile.)

I am not allowed to access my personal email at work. (Also lots of other things, alas.) I subscribe to several technical mailing lists using my home (that is, permanent) address, but I'd like to be able to access the lists at work. So I have begun a campaign of public folders with linked email addresses that I can subscribe to lists. This was, apparently, a novel idea in my 50-year-old, 70,000-employee company -- go figure. But for once, the corporate side of the machinery worked. No, what I'm having trouble with now is the other end. Some of these lists are hosted by Yahoo; unlike with Majordomo and some others, in order to subscribe to a Yahoo list you need to either send mail from the subscribing address (which I can't do, as it's not a real account -- and forgery is surely against corporate policy even in a good cause) or create a Yahoo profile. I already have a Yahoo profile that I don't want to interfere with, so I set out to create a new one.

I tried to be honest and up-front; for "name" I entered something like "$company email forwarder" ("forwarder" is a perfectly good surname, I say), and for "date of birth" I listed the date of acquisition. This netted me a message that you must be at least two years old to have a Yahoo profile. Ok, I changed the date to the founding date of the original company (the one that got bought), at which point Yahoo told me I had to get a parent to complete the registration for me. Ok, fine -- I entered a suitably-distant date. But Yahoo, having already flagged this as a child's account, wouldn't let me change that. Fine -- I could start over. Nope -- anything I did from that point on, even in a different browser, got the "your parent needs to enter a valid credit-card number" treatment. (I guess a credit card establishes person-hood in their eyes.) Yahoo apparently logged my IP address as suspicious. (I wonder how long that'll last. Mind, I'm a little startled to find that our corporate masters allowed me to reach the account-creation page at Yahoo to begin with.) Oh well. So I sent email to the owner of the first list of interest asking for a direct subscription; we'll see if that works.

I now regularly use three different browsers at work -- Firefox for most things for the extensions, Mozilla for when I need "file:///" links to work (yes, tried the Firefox fix and it didn't), and IE for talking to certain corporate web sites. I still find it ironic that a security-conscious company requires IE -- and sometimes IE with the security settings turned all the way down.

Comments

[cellio]

Thanks for the wireless information. That gives me data about the efficacy of getting a cheap personal laptop.

Yahoo eventually let me in again and I created a profile, with a still-obvious name and my own birthdate. That way it matches the actual person behind the ID, though I suppose I could cease to be the owner of the work mailing list in the future and Yahoo probably doesn't let you edit birth dates on a profile. Oh well; we can burn that bridge when we come to it. :-)