Working as a contractor you come into contact with a wide range of company 'cultures'. The longer you're there the more likely you are to experience the weird edges that don't marry up with the rebranding exercises.

I've been working at an agency for a couple of months now and I'm coming towards the end of the contract. One of the big things that changed about a month ago was I got a Mac to develop on. What I didn't realise was I also got a new first line technical support dude. Let's call him Algernon, or Algy for short (the names have been changed to protect the guilty).

Now on the pc I had I pretty much had the run of it after the first week along with all the other developers I'd installed a few bits and pieces, and had generally got it to the poitn where I could work fairly comfortably. My first shock with the new Mac was I had no rights to the Application folder, and I didn't get TextMate, bummer I thought, oh well, I've got Macports and fuse and hey, TextWrangler is ok. Well, the next 10 minutes were disappointing. Not being on the list of sudoers (hey I thought I was BORN there) means Macports is pretty useless as was Macfuse so I'm stuck with TextWrangler and Cyberduck (which is great but that glassy eyed plastic duck look like it's about to flip out and eat it's own children or something). I did put in a request to install some other stuff, but was told (quickest response I've ever had from a service desk - 10 seconds max) that I was to use Cyberduck and LIKE IT. So no mounting remote file systems and using Textmate the same way you'd use it on local files but via the terminal (my preferred method).

The real dissapointment though was no Quicksilver. I can't actually function on a mac without it - I'm constantly pressing [ctrl]+[space] to no effect. So screw it, I'll run it from the desktop - who will mind? Next day it's gone. Ok. It's a script - no big deal, I'll unzip it and run it again. Fine.

A few days later I made a rather unfortunate service desk request (Can I please run MAMP as it is actually installed on the damn machine but just won't run). Algy let it be known that MAMP only runs if you have admin privileges and he'd rather resign than allow me those. Woah. I start mentally backing away from this one. Who is this Algy guy anyway? I've met most of the other service desk people. Why does he have to send Nigel up to talk to me and my project manager? I begin to feel that Algy might be rather "tightly rolled" as they say. Who know what might happen if he actually flips? I mean if I can push him to the edge of resigning by asking to run MAMP what might happen if I actually asked a serious question, like, how come you installed all this software on my computer and then don't allow me to actually use it? Isn't that sort of a waste of everyones time? It turns out time isn't really an issue for Algy.

So, it became known around the company that I'd pushed poor Algy to the brink of resignation, and I thought that was enough - I'm not here to cause trouble - I'll keep my head down.

But I kept running Quicksilver, it's pretty harmless I thought, who could really object to me working more efficiently and it was only a small infraction of THE RULES. Well, today when I unzipped and ran QS it ran for a while stopped, dissapeared and the Trash (where I was storing my zipped copy) was emptied. Hey, new script I thought. So I downloaded it and ran it again. Same thing happend.

The project I'm working on is effectively stalled and I'm writing the documentation, so I thought, screw it, I'm only here for another week, I'll live without. But the machine was running so slowly I was getting angry, ok, stop me running a harmless bit of productivity enhancing software but please don't totally screw up the machine with an abberant script, so I started filing a service desk report complaining that the machine was running verrry sloowlly. I actually got most of the way through and was just (anally) timing the response time of changing from app to app (54 seconds to go from Safari to Cyberduck) to include in the report when Safari crashed.

At least that is what I thought, it just dissapered without the usual 'Safari has crashed' box. So I tried again and right at the end of the report just before I pressed send, "hey presto!" It dissapered again and suddenly the machine started responding normally again. Seems Algy had been remote desktopping into my machine all day watching me failing to get anywork done and when I started to file a complaint he fled.

I have to say that the rest of my expereince of the agency has been uniformly positive, nice people, nice company, nice policies, I even got a 40 minute induction when I arrived (in stark contrast to most places where yo get "you'll be sitting here and I'll be pretending I don't know you for the rest of your stay"). Just this weird fascist 'service' desk.

It was shocking enough to record because generally the computer feels like such a private space, a place where, as a programmer on a roll, you feel amost unmediated brain activity, a place where you're free of physical restraints and can run ideas down wherever they lead. So, I have to tell you it's distictly creepy to know you've been watched all day and there is something quite perverse about it. Not just the perverse and monumental waste of time of personally monitoring someone who just wants to work, but there is also a sort of peeping Tom aspect, like a janitor sneeking a look into the kids changing room, which leaves me with one burning question: Hey Algy! Getting any?