Can't Work
The last couple days at work have been pretty unproductive. Anxiety and sleep deprivation played a role, but also my work computer is unimaginably slow. I got a lot of sleep last night, and woke up ready to knuckle down, focus, and take a chunk out of this backlog; but my computer's having a moment. I feel antsy and restless. I want to be working on something, so I figured I'd fire up the ol' markdown editor and blat out some words.
My work computer is an HP Prodesk, an office workstation like a million others. It runs Windows 10. It has an intel core i5 7th gen CPU, which is 7 years old. It has 4GB of ram, which is not enough. I don't know how many Rs the spinning rust hard drive performs PM, but it's not enough.
All of this would be unbearable on its own, but there's also an enterprise spyware program installed called SentinalOne which I think records video of everything that happens on the computer at all times. All of my work is browser-based, and we're forced to use Chrome, where there's a browser extension called "SentinalOne DeepVisibility plugin", which I don't know what it does but it couldn't sound more menacing. I don't know why the plugin is needed in addition to the desktop spyware. What can the plugin see that even the palantir cannot? The mind boggles.
The worst piece of malware I'm forced to run is Windows Defender. It scans the system seemingly at random, during which the ram and disk usage are both pegged at 100% for 4-6 hours. When this happens, I'm allowed to perform one action, such as switching to another tab or selecting text, approximately every 20 minutes. I'm actually looking forward to the Windows 10 EOL in October, because there's no way this computer will run W11, and whatever new computer they give me might be mostly functional for a few months.
If I were in charge, and I cared about people being able to do work, here's what I'd do: since our job is 100% Chrome-based, and everything we do is either a proprietary web app or a Google service, I'd move everyone to ChromeOS Flex. It's a "cloud-based operating system", a phrase that in reference to my own relationship with computers would fill me with cosmic horror, but for an organization that's all-in on Google anyway, it makes sense. It would not only save money on equipment upgrades, but we could cancel the licenses for all the Microsoft products we're no longer using. It would probably save us thousands of dollars a year. But then they wouldn't be able to use any of the Saeder-Krupp heavy industrial spyware they're so fond of, so I guess I'll keep occasionally performing 0.05 actions per minute until someone notices, realizes how bad this makes them look and fires me to save face 🦝