[2264] in APO News
Re: office security
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (David Z Maze)
Mon Dec 2 09:51:57 1996
To: "Richard J. Barbalace" <rjbarbal@MIT.EDU>
Cc: apo-news@MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Mon, 02 Dec 1996 09:37:28 EST."
<199612021437.JAA11196@tla.MIT.EDU>
Date: Mon, 02 Dec 1996 09:50:46 EST
From: David Z Maze <dmaze@MIT.EDU>
"Richard J. Barbalace" <rjbarbal@MIT.EDU> wrote:
> > so i don't think this is good. anyone know what we might do about it?
>
> Well, there are several problems here:
> 1) An MIT student was inconvenienced.
> 2) A janitor was inconvenienced.
> 3) Office security could have been compromised.
> 4) Our reputation probably just got a little bit worse.
>
> There is, of course, a simple solution to this:
> We should not take the MIT Card from students.
This is an overly simplistic problem to what is perhaps a serious
problem. As was discussed at some point (ExecComm?) the point of
having collateral is to make sure that we get the supplies back, and
if the collateral doesn't have some value it won't achieve this goal.
In this case, our holding the MIT Card achieved the desired goal: we
recovered the drop poster supplies.
> I see no problem with an MIT student returning our supplies and retrieving
> her needed card, especially with a janitor overseeing her. If we don't
> trust janitors, we're screwed anyway. If we don't trust students, we're
> screwed anyway. This situation is our fault, not the student's or the
> janitor's.
Short of keeping someone in the office 24 hours a day, what can we
really do? If we hold collateral that has value (like MIT Cards),
people will sometimes need them back. This situation seems reasonable
and proves (to me at least) that holding the MIT Card as collaterral
actually works: it is important enough that people will go out of
their way to return whatever it is they borrowed. Given that people
will sometimes need to get into the office, the best we can do is to
trust the janitors -- which, as Richard points out, we kind of have to
anyways.
YiLFS,
David (I still can't believe that's not ambiguous!)
