Last Friday I was ten minutes away from a major presentation at work. After months of flawless performance, my MacBook Pro started giving problems. Both Excel and Powerpoint started slowing down and not responding. Perhaps a reboot will solve everything. Which I tried. And my computer wouldn’t log back in at all. And I was stuck. Terribly.

Thankfully, the situation was saved with my colleague, my tag team member, and my manager (all the same person) presenting a backup copy from her machine and I was able to participate in the MS Teams session from my personal Macbook and my iPad. The session went as well as it could. But the login problem is yet to be solved for three days of working through with the help desk. With no clue yet as to what the resolution might be.

Rewind to Wednesday last. Two days before this presentation. My help desk had scheduled a meeting to install some protection and VPN software updates on my computer. Which we did and verified that things worked well. Except that I never rebooted my computer until two days later. Until ten minutes before that strategy session. And that was building up to be what a sequence of comedy of errors. Or the swiss cheese line-up as they are also known. Things line up at random times. Good and the bad. At unexpected times. And Mr. Murphy (of Murphy’s law) is always around.

The funny thing in all this is that corporate security and the products and processes they use make it harder for employees to work from the overhead they introduce. Except that the intruders and the criminals who are the ones to be blocked seem to waft their way in using zero day defects and football-sized holes in software and internet products, and are able to laugh all the way to the bank. Metaphorically and result-wise. What an ironic shame?