Security Nightmares
At one place I worked at, I was contracted as a security analyst with an organization that had two sets of standards: One for contractors, and one for ‘real’ employees.
When working as a hired gun, I wear a suit and tie to look professional. It makes a good impression on the company that’s paying your employers if you’re clean-cut and look respectable, right? At said outfit, I was written up twice (formal reprimands from my boss and boss’ boss) for pretending to be management, ostensibly so that I didn’t have to work. I started wearing a turtleneck and jeans, and everything was hunky-dory insofar as the dress code was concerned.
At another gig, they went through the exit interview procedure in the CISSP study guides step by step after my contract was up: Guards escorting me to the boss’ office, four hours of questions pertaining to what I was working on, how I did it, whose contact information I had,
what I could and couldn’t talk about, the whole nine yards.
And then they erased about ten gigs of stuff from my laptop’s hard drive. Some non-sensitive work-related stuff, some e-mails that had been queued in my local inbox, some documentation that I’d downloaded from vendors’ websites, and a boatload of e-books that had absolutely nothing to do with what I was working on. They also torched my USB keys and checked the CDs I had in my backpack.