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Friday, October 4, 2002 |
do the math...
Some janitors in the Oakland, California school system have been fired for falsifying their time cards, and more are under investigation. This isn't a big deal; the $150,000 they're suspected of having stolen is nothing compared to what Oakland got ripped for by the manipulation of the power market by Enron and others.Here's the interesting part (if you're a geek, anyway): the supervisor who was fired claims that he didn't look closely at what he was signing, as he signs 1500 timesheets a month.
Years ago, I got into the habit of doing "back of the envelope" calculations in my head as I read the news. Work it out: 40 hours in a week, nominally four weeks in a month is 160 hours, times 60 is 9600 minutes. If it takes him only one minute to sign a timesheet, that means he is spending 25 hours, 15% of his entire month doing nothing but signing his name. These 25 hours a month could have been used to actually supervise the janitors, which could have led to the fraud being discovered earlier and might even have discouraged them from trying it.
Phony security measures aren't just useless, they're nearly always an actual security risk, because they consume resources that could have been used to provide actual security.
