This morning I got a call from some IT marketing company drone. I immediately recognized the company name she gave as one that’s called us before—some outfit ostensibly in San Diego— and also her initial spiel. They’d already been told that we don’t participate in such marketing surveys, and we’d asked to be added to their do-not-call list.

So they were asking for trouble, basically. Greatly annoyed that these knuckleheads were pestering us again with the same questions, and being momentarily caught up on the day’s tasks, I decided to screw with their data. It turned out that they still had some bad data to begin with, so I added some poison to their stale information. As far as they know, the following is all true:

• Our IT operations are still headed by a fellow who left two years ago.
• We have 20 x86 computers and ~220 Macs.
• We have about a dozen printers (including some Apple LaserWriters and a pair of ancient Brother daisywheel units)
• We have 7 WAPs serving ~20 users.
• We have no laptops.
• We have not purchased any computers in the last 12 months, and do not plan to purchase any within the next 12 months.
• We have only five high-end workstations.
• Linux? What’s that?
• We’re still running Windows 2000.
• Our network has no WAN connections to other locations, being entirely self-contained.
• Over half our campus is still on 10BaseT.
• We have not implemented any form of identity management, RBAC, or anything similar.
• Data security is an extremely low-priority item. About 40% of our budget goes to data security, however.
• Another 20% of our budget is devoted to network maintenance, 15% to application development, and the remaining 40% evenly divided between support, hardware purchases, and a “major project” to implement “enterprise document virtualization”, which is something I made up on the spot. (Never mind that this adds up to 115%.)
• We consider the above infrastructure to be “good enough for the next 5 to 10 years”.

Keep in mind these numbers are for a public research university campus with roughly 32,000 students and 30,000 faculty and staff members. Waste my time, and I’ll return the favor.