ACCESS DENIED

I had my first taste of dealing with the ASUS corporate structure today, and let me tell ya, it's all about CYA over here. I happened to have two separate issues at around the same time which set me back about two hours of doing work. The first issue I had was with my work badge, which was a temporary "Overseas Visitor" badge. These badges not only get you onto the campus, but what floors you have access to (ASUS HQ is 16 floors). Also on the card is an allowance for lunch and if you work OT, dinner. With an OV badge, I got 200ntd a day, which is about 50% more than what the locals get,but all dumped into the card's balance at once. My coworker likes starbucks a lot, so in addition to the breakfast/lunch/dinner meals, he would get some coffee from Starbucks, which start at about 100ntd. This put him over his monthly allowance a bit early, and we had to go through HR to add more money to it from my department's budget. But they figured since it happened to him, it would happen to me soon, and I should go ahead and top off my card. This is where the fun begins. Apparently, I'm classified as a contractor/freelancer, which means I don't need to be in the office and can technically do the job from wherever I have an Internet connection. Because of this, they change my badge access from OV to visitor, which means my floor access is restricted to 4 floors. Oh yeah, I can't use the super convenient rear entrance for employees, and have to go all the way around to the main entrance for visitors, an extra 5 minute walk. HR was so adamant on this because of my status and was unwilling to change, even though I've already been here a month and I'm doing the same job as my coworker, but he was a transfer from Singapore. Another coworker had been helping me out translating all the stuff I didn't understand, and he was annoyed as well. Apparently, after we got back to our floor, the HR department contacted our director and lodged a formal complaint at us and the "attitude" we showed towards them. The HR department, and to an extent, the entire corporate structure here, is so ass backwards where it takes a mountain of paperwork to get the smallest thing like adding a pittance of an amount to a card. Companies should enact a "common sense" rule besides the rule, "is this good for the company?".

That was run in number one. Number two deals with the MIS department, or better known in the states as the IT department. There's an entire floor dedicated to just IT, and it's crazy the amount of people they have to support, since there's about 3000 employees at HQ. Not long after lunch, all of my inter/intranet access was shut down. Not knowing what was going on, I checked with my coworker, and his access was still up, so I moved on to my translator friend for some assistance. I checked my Ethernet port at my cube, since I'm quite familiar in dealing with various levels of IT. he called them up, told them what was going on, then finally gave them my port number. They talked for a bit, hung up, then told me that my access was shut down to "unusual activity" with a google account. As it turns out, there were over 4600 requests to a google site that they were not familiar with, way more than any other person in the entire building, so they shut it down as a preventative measure. Turns out that 4600+ requests were from my google voice extension I was using in Chrome. I use it to communicate with a few friends here and there, but even when I'm not using it, it still autochecks every few minutes. I went up to the IT floor, they asked what I was using, and I showed them, and they just asked me to disable the extensions, which I was fine to do. After that, I was on my way and back up and working. Since they don't have gvoice phone numbers here in Taiwan, they saw no need to shut down access to those ports. I sure showed them :) I don't have the extension running anymore, but the access is still there, so feel free to send me a text if you're bored ;)

I had posted another version of this story from my iPhone, but for some reason I can't find this post, and another I wrote, so I'm re-publishing it. Most of it is was written that day, but the last little bit was finished just now, as I was mid thought when the MRT got to my stop. Maybe it'll show up again, who knows.