This was originally handwritten in my journal and converted to a post
To continue the whole “why do I care” and me writing things down and explaining is a personal life goal (I need to write about that as well), consider yesterday’s virtual meeting at work.
It went as expected. My supervisor was a bit late, as they usually are, because of back-to-back meetings they have (I guess this happens when you’re on the top of the food chain for IT).
I had a couple of issues I wanted to bring up, but what matters here is an issue that concerns information security for our institution. More specifically, I found technical information that should be internal on our public-facing website instead. While no patients were exposed (it would have been much worse!), that information belonged in our intranet, meant for our users only, not everyone on the World Wide Web.
The people in the meetings were unaware of this issue, which I knew beforehand, which is why I wanted to bring it up to begin with. Writing information and putting information into the right place is my job, but this particular article pre-dated when I started my role.
The obvious question: why bother?
I could have easily ignored it, and if something had gone wrong, I’d have the lack of knowledge around me as CYA ammunition; after all, no one told me this was a problem, so why would I know?
But, see, the problem is that I care. And no, this is not a compliment, trust me. When you run into people who roll their eyes at you and sigh or joke about “always with the questions!” about me, it’s not a quality you’re proud of. Caring is not enough. I also like it. I’m passionate about it. It’s what I do.
If I were to use this energy in my own projects (which I do when I can), I would enjoy it more because there would be less friction from other people (delays, disagreements, etc.). as long as I didn’t dig holes in the ground and fall down the cliff like the coyote in Road Runner.
Sometimes I wonder though, if I should care less and keep quiet.
A comment from 2025-01-19: I believe that seeing potential problems and “caring” is one of the things people like about my work. The other part is that with this “caring” comes organization and instructions they didn’t have before.