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[Nadaka]

Just got done spending an hour and a half helping a glorified secretary who makes $100K+ edit a document which she translated from a classified Mexican governnment document using Google Translate. And converted from a PDF to Word. And needed help with tweaking all the little conversion problems because as a $100K+ secretary she doesn't know how to do basic fucking editing in Word.

I have friends with Master's Degrees who could natively translate the document AND do all the editing bullshit for a fraction of her salary. Fuck, *I* could do that. I was able to tell where the footnotes went even with my broken-ass Spanish. SO MUCH RAAAAAGE. People like this are both:

A. Why the Federal government is a creaky, expensive hot mess.
B. Why younger people coming out of college and grad school and looking to work for the government CAN'T GET A FUCKING JOB.

The what? Google translate on a classified document? Well... At least she didn't use Amazons mechanical turk. So someone might not see it.

[Scaraban]

What's the point google already knows everything that's even been on any computer that was, however briefly, connected to the internet.

[RedKing]

It's worse than that. Google likes to record things. As in, everything. So they probably have the text of that classified document now.

You might want to report that.

YES I KNOW. Unfortunately, she's high-enough placed that it probably wouldn't matter. This is hardly the first time she's been a colossal fuck-up. My only guess as to why she still has a job is.....y'know, I'm not going to say what my guess is because I'm better than that and don't want any misperceptions of my rage. It's not sexism or racism, it's just sheer hatred for incompetence. Especially highly-paid, highly-placed incompetence.

Besides, it'd probably get shrugged off as "Well, it was Mexican-classified, not US."

[olemars]

At work we've simply accepted this reality and switched to using Google Apps for anything suitable.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

It's not like Google can easily find something specific in the massive amount of data they gather. For that they'd need some kind of highly advanced search engine or som-oh fuck.

[RedKing]

I think my rage on that particular point wasn't that she was using Google Translate specifically, but that she was using ANY translation program. There are god-knows-how-many hundred people in the Bureau who speak Spanish fluently. This particular waste of oxygen works in the International Division. Which means that she probably deals with Spanish-language documents (and people) on a daily basis. You'd think perhaps being bilingual would be part of the job description?? If using Google-freakin-Translate qualifies, then I've been wasting my goddamned time learning Mandarin for the last few years....

[Nadaka]

At work we've simply accepted this reality and switched to using Google Apps for anything suitable.

Congratulations. You are contributing to Google knowing everything.

Google can only know what you tell it, and what the ad scripts on every page tell it, and what info that back room deals with other sites can tell it and anything you have on your android smartphone. So mostly it knows "stuff you do on the internet" rather than "stuff you have on your hard drive".

[nenjin]

Don't you guys have a primer course on digital security, of the "don't look at porn at work" and "use internal services for sensitive data" variety? In this day and age, I figure it shouldn't take much to get fired from a position like that for things like that, or at least demoted to the mail room where you can't fuck up as bad.

[Maggarg - Eater of chicke]

The battering my body took at B-O-A this weekend has finally caught up with me - insect bites, wasp stings, general fatigue from standing up and jumping all day, every day and sleeping for 3-5 hours a night in the cold and damp of a tent, and some admittedly fairly light mosh-induced injuries - mostly medium-sized bruises, grazes and cuts - although I've got a big one on my ribcage. I'm also crashing a bit from the gargantuan amount of caffeine I had on the drive back to stay awake.

[PyroDesu]

Goddamn it, my neck is hurting for some reason. Can't move it more than an inch in any direction.
What pisses me off is that this is not the first time it's happened. And each time that I've gone to a doctor for it, the idiot said it was a viral infection and prescribed strong antibiotics for it. I'd headdesk if it wasn't for, you know, my neck being painfully immobile.

I had that happen to me once. Apparently I did something to one of my neck muscles and fucked it up for a few days.

Heat helps. A lot. Even those little pocket hand-warmers work.

[Maggarg - Eater of chicke]

Goddamn it, my neck is hurting for some reason. Can't move it more than an inch in any direction.
What pisses me off is that this is not the first time it's happened. And each time that I've gone to a doctor for it, the idiot said it was a viral infection and prescribed strong antibiotics for it. I'd headdesk if it wasn't for, you know, my neck being painfully immobile.

I had that happen to me once. Apparently I did something to one of my neck muscles and fucked it up for a few days.

Heat helps. A lot. Even those little pocket hand-warmers work.

I have a practically immobile neck at the moment but that's my fault for headbanging too much.

[RedKing]

Don't you guys have a primer course on digital security, of the "don't look at porn at work" and "use internal services for sensitive data" variety? In this day and age, I figure it shouldn't take much to get fired from a position like that for things like that, or at least demoted to the mail room where you can't fuck up as bad.

Yes. We do. Everyone takes it. Nobody pays any fucking attention to it, because we still have at least half a dozen people a week who wind up having to get their system wiped because they clicked on a phishing link, or fell prey to one of those "You have virus on you system! Click heres to download teh cleanr" popups. And virtually nobody gets fired because it's the government. Firing people in the government nearly takes an Act of Congress. Instead they find them a nice, quiet desk somewhere and give them as little work as possible. It's one of the nasty poorly-kept secrets of government jobs. And it's not just the Feds. My wife and a couple of friends all work for the state gov't, and they've seen the same kind of thing. People who are incompetent but who haven't actually violated any rules (other than "Thou shalt not be a fuck-up", which is one of my cardinal rules) don't get fired, they get sent shuttled off to somebody who doesn't want them and has no work for them to do.

Even within the corporate world, this is often true. It's been flat-out admitted to me that a few of my coworkers are only here to act as 'cannon fodder' for if/when the next round of layoffs comes through. By hanging on to a few useless people, you're not forced to sacrifice useful workers. They're the RL equivalent of putting Soap Makers and Fish Dissectors in the first wave of your DF military. >_<

[nenjin]

Here the saying goes "It takes an act of God to fire a state employee." So I know the routine. I just figured at the highest levels of government, getting demoted for stuff like that happened a lot more frequently. Given who you work for, potential security breaches would, I think, the best reason to get moved around.

But yeah. The fact she works for a government agency that employs full-time linguists as a necessity, makes that all pretty fucking stupid no matter which way you slice it.

[RedKing]

Here the saying goes "It takes an act of God to fire a state employee." So I know the routine. I just figured at the highest levels of government, getting demoted for stuff like that happened a lot more frequently. Given who you work for, potential security breaches would, I think, the best reason to get moved around.

But yeah. The fact she works for a government agency that employs full-time linguists as a necessity, makes that all pretty fucking stupid no matter which way you slice it.

Breaches tend to only get punished if somebody in the news (or Congress) finds out, or if somebody dies as a result. (And sometimes not even then.)

[kaijyuu]

*note to self: get a government job and be a lazy, lazy bum*