Administrator rights are like oxygen, says Randy Rutherford. “Sure it’s my employer’s computer. It’s their office too, but I can breathe whenever I want.”
Randy was among throngs of protestors swarming outside the United Nations Thursday, demanding they be granted administrator or ‘root’ level access to their work computers. Some estimated there were as many as 7 protestors, however most placed the number around 3.
We asked Mr. Rutherford about the motivation behind a protest unlike most others seen at the UN. He said:
At work one day I found this great website with coupon codes for cool stores like Sears.com and Banana Republic. It even had a special browser you could install; the browser would alert you if a discount was available when you visited an online store. I was so excited that I tried to install it right away, but I got some crazy pop-up that said I needed an administrator password. Which is strange because I never see that on my home computer; it’s almost like the company IT people have control of it. I called the help desk and they refused to put the password in. I asked them to give me the password so I could type it in; they said no to that too.
I complained to my supervisor and she just told me to get back to work. We were having some beers on break, I mean after work, and it turns out Jeff from the mailroom had the same kind of thing happen, Margie in RMA processing too. Heck, they wouldn’t even let her install this cool horoscope software she found. So here we are at the United Nations. I figure we may as well go right to the top, because if it’s happening to us you know it’s happening all over.
We asked the protesters if they had any specific demands. One woman, who gave her name as ‘The Admin Avenger,’ handed us a flyer. It read:
Our Demand:
Administrator level access to employer-owned computing devices should be recognized by the United Nations as a human right, reflecting the fundamental nature of this need in every person’s life. Lack of admin rights has a devastating effect on the loafing, procrastination, and social-media access of billions of workers, and has significant consequences for the realization of other human rights as well.
She said “You want to know why I’m here? That flyer is printed in black-and-white. My boss won’t even let me send jobs to the color printer.”
