All access

It's 1977, and this pilot fish's company is moving to a new data center. "The old facility was in the basement of the headquarters building," says fish. "Access was via an ancient magnetic strip reader with no special capabilities. You either got in or you didn't.

"The new facility had state-of-the-art card readers, supported by a small midrange system. It had lots of capabilities -- and the security department was a little paranoid about access to the facility."

So it is that, about a month after the move to the new building, the security department programs the system to allow admission only during scheduled working hours.

For mainframers like fish, that's from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., and anyone who arrives early has to stand around waiting to get into the office.

But that's the least of the problems. A few days after the new security rules are enabled, one of the system programmers gets a call at home in the middle of the night to come to the office and fix a problem.

He drives in, gets to the door -- and can't get in. The security system won't unlock the door for his access card.

Fortunately, there's a security guard on duty at the door. Unfortunately, he's not authorized to override the security system for employees. It takes several hours before the system programmer can get into the data center to fix the problem.

Next morning, a senior IT staffer walks into the office of the director responsible for IT infrastructure -- and the discussion is brief and heated.

"He simply said that either this was his office and he was free to come and go as he deemed necessary to fulfill his duties or it was not his office -- the decision was up to the director," fish says.

"He then returned to his desk and began to pack his personal items.

"The director called our manager into his office for another brief discussion.

"The senior staffer was asked to unpack his personal items and the security department was ordered to remove all time-constraints from the system immediately."

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