These days, I try not to have any preset expectations about what the New Year will bring. 2007 is no different. A year ago, the office I work at in downtown Chicago (20th floor of a modern Loop office building) suffered a massive flood caused by a burst water pipe a couple floors above us. We suffered a lot of equipment loss, but my own office and the server room were spared, so it could have been much worse. Needless to say, the first half of 2006 was spent on recovering from that. If you were to walk into our offices now, you’d be none the wiser about what had happened, save for a photo album containing flood pictures.

So when New Years Day 2007 came and went, I told myself that I’ll just roll with the punches for this year as well. It didn’t take long for the first punch to hit me firmly in the gut. On the first workday of the year, Tuesday 1/2/07, I head back to my office. Shortly after taking my coat off, but before I think I could even plug my laptop into the docking station, the HR manager hurries into my office from her office next door. She has a concerned look on her face. She quickly informs me that over the New Years weekend, a laptop was stolen from the office.

I took a moment to absorb the news… she goes on to tell me it was stolen from a key member of our finance organization. For reasons I won’t go into here (and believe me, I’ve tried to institute changes, but I am not high up enough on the food chain), many of our laptop users still have a lot of local data on their laptops. I’ve worked with some laptop users in my office on an individual basis about using Offline folders as a means of allowing files to be stored on a local file server as well as being available away from the network. But we don’t have any kind of “no-brainer” way for our mobile workers to automatically keep their local data backed up.

Next, in comes the end user who had the laptop stolen. He is visibly devastated, as he is trying to fathom how much work he will have to recreate. My first order of business is to “talk him off the ledge”, which I do after I remind him of a few things that we do have working to our advantage.

• He would suffer no loss of e-mail based data. We had completed our e-mail migration from Exchange 5.5 to Exchange 2003 a couple months previously. Part of this migration was eliminating the use of Outlook Personal Folder files (PSTs), so all mail was server based.
• We had a lot of his data (but sadly not the most recent) on the network as a side effect of migrating him to a new laptop in July. Part of the migration was to save everything on his old laptop to his network home folder, and it was still there.
• We were in good shape in terms of the security of the data on the stolen laptop (assuming it was NOT an inside job). Our policy is for all laptops to have not only a BIOS (Power-On) password, but an internal HDD password as well. So even if the internal HDD was removed from the laptop it could not easily be mounted to view any data (we also rename the local admin account, and use strong passwords) . Again, if the theft was an inside job, it’s possible the culprit knew our power-on passwords, but then it’s hard for us really protect against that.

My next task was to get this person back up and running as quickly as possible. I found an idle desktop and let him log into his e-mail via Outlook Web Access, so at least he could tell his colleague what had happened. I located a laptop that I could re-image for him, which took me only a few minutes. Within a couple hours, I had his e-mail re-synched and had copied what data we had for him back to this loaner laptop. As I brought this loaner laptop into his office, I noticed something about the actual theft… his original laptop had been secured to his dock with a Kensington Microsaver cable lock. The thief had used brute force to pry the laptop out of the dock. The dock was just destroyed as a result. They must have used a large flathead screwdriver or some other piece of metal to pry around where the lock connects and laptop eject button is located. The user did everything right, and the machine was still stolen. About mid-day, I came to learn a second, yes a second, laptop had disappeared. This one was not locked down, but I don’t think it would have mattered if it were.

Chicago PD would not send an investigator to our office as there was insufficient evidence of a “break-in”… they just issued us a report number. Our building management seemed somewhat less than interested in the event, kind of giving us the “it happens” attitude. I did work with our office facilities coordinator and we looked up card swipe activity on our security system. There were no card swipes after close of business on the previous Friday until that morning when the first person arrived for the day. There were no signs of forced entry. Draw your own conclusions.

So that was my official start to 2007 on the work side of my life. On the personal side of my life, my wife started a new job, working in a corporate communications group within the IT department of a large health insurance company. She’s coming in as a contractor, but she’s happy to have normal work hours having been in the hospitality industry for six years. She’s adjusting to corporate life, and the red-tape that comes with it, but she appears to be enjoying herself. The sad news is my mother’s health continues to deteriorate and we have some tough decisions to make in the coming weeks. I lost my dad in March 2006, something I still haven’t completely processed. And to add insult to injury, my older brother found out his Illinois National Guard unit is deploying to Iraq in a couple of months (for approx. one year tour).

Like the title says, I’m having an interesting start to 2007.