Supernatural - the legacy

It’s 21st November 2020 and the Supernatural finale happened two days ago. I’m still getting over it, but in order to do that I need to process what happened.

Warning! Danger, Will Robinson!

Here be SPOILERS for Supernatural - the series finale!

So much to unpack here - the episode itself, the reaction from the ‘fans’, the feeling of knowing it’s over after so long. Let’s start at the beginning.

The Episode

In best SPN tradition, the big ending people thought was going to go down was actually resolved in the penultimate episode. This left one more round of 40 minutes to clear up everything hanging. Would we find out what happened to Castiel, would we see Jack again, would we find that monsters and demons and angels and everyone else - were they gone now? Cleared up by Jack reverse-Thanos’ing everyone back into existence? Were the other universes brought back too? AU!Charlie and AU!Bobby - were they back as they were? I hope so.

It seemed that Castiel really was gone - as was Death. Of course the next reaper would become the new Death so that would take care of people on Earth. Sounds like Castiel tinkered quite a bit with Heaven and its inhabitants, causing rebellion, sedition, incitement to tear down walls and have a peaceful Heaven as it should have been. From what Bobby said Jack apparently visited, set some things straight, changed Heaven from a place where you relive your greatest moments into a place where you can make new moments. Logically his would imply a new kind of life - an afterlife of new moments, made outside of normal Earth time. So everyone up there - and Bobby made sure Dean knew his parents weren’t far away - may be gone from Earth, but they’re still going. If Heaven is perfect and you have everything you could ever want, it sounds like the perfect ending.

As long as Dean doesn’t get bored of the easy life.

We see Sam’s life after Dean and it’s a good one. Briefly told in quick flashes, the only weird thing is that we never see his wife. Would it have hurt to add in someone from a previous series that he goes back for, and stays with? But he raises his own Dean, and the circle is complete. Dean raised Sam, so Sam raises a Dean. And when Sam finally goes too, there he is, right back next to his brother. Even the Impala made it - or did it? Was it just something Dean would have wanted, and it therefore appeared (with the original number plates), or did it take on enough of an imprint from its owners that it became its own thing, and was rewarded by getting to an afterlife? People will argue about this for the next fifteen years, I’m sure.

But Dean called it - like he always does. When he told Zachariah he’d ‘stab him in his face’, and then seasons later he did just that. When he said he didn’t shoot the deputy, and seasons later he did just that. When he told Sam his perfect happy ending would be Dean having died relatively quick and bloody in some average fight, causing Sam to leave The Life, have a family, and end up dying old and loved - he did just that, and Sam did just that. It was a good ending, the kind of thing I could see happening. Dean got what he wanted, after all the fighting and arguing and fallings-out and raging against the being who put them all through it. He got what he wanted. And after everything, it came back to just Sam and Dean. And I’m ok with that.

The Reaction from the ‘Fans’

It seems a lot of people were not ok with that. Twitter, tumblr, social media in general - the fall-out from the episode was horrific. At time of writing, I am ashamed of the way some of the ‘fans’ have treated the cast and crew who gave us fifteen years of a show that wasn’t pegged to last more than one. While outpourings of love, of loss, of grief and thanks overflowed between the final filming day and the moments before the finale aired, as soon as it ended it was a different story. People ranted, they swore, they sent tweets to cast and crew saying how the ending was shit, how it was stupid and didn’t make sense, how it ‘ruined’ everything, how it wrote off relationships. Ugly, ugly responses indeed considering the source material and how the fandom has been mostly supportive up to this point. I don’t understand how you can turn on something so quickly, so completely, after hungrily devouring everything given to you in the past fifteen years. Some people have fallen out of love with the show gradually, some have fallen by the wayside, and some have just plain given up with it, and I get that. I gladly cut ties with Doctor Who after the way they wrote Peter Capaldi’s first two episodes made me realise the showrunner was a complete and utter self-centred prick who thought racist digs and jokes about sentient beings burning to death in front of them were ok to air. I gave the show with Jodie Whittaker another chance, since the showrunner had been booted for losing 40% of its ratings. (It’s ok, but it’s not the Christopher Eccleston / David Tennant years.)

What I’m saying is, I understand how people can go off a show and walk away. What I don’t understand it how they can continue to watch it if they don’t like it - why do that to yourself? Why torture yourself by making yourself follow a show you actively despise? Just walk away and leave it, go find something else you do like. Unfortunately, that’s a thing with many shows these days - people on social media are only too happy to leave comments saying how bad something is and that no-one should watch it. I reply to these people now, where I used to ignore them. “Then go watch something that makes you happy”, “then stop watching”, “you don’t have to watch it”, “take control of your life and stop watching if it makes you unhappy”, etc. I get backlash but I literally do not care. Someone has to make the point that no-one welcomes a step-by-step account of how they’re still torturing themselves by posting and commenting about something they profess to hate. I get that “sad is happy for deep people”, but behaviour like that toward people who are still enjoying something is just bollocks and they need to fuck right off and leave others to enjoy something they don’t. It’s everywhere in and out of fandom right now and it needs to die a horrible bloody death as soon as possible.

There seems to be a lot of ‘fans’ chucking their toys out of their respective prams because they didn’t get the ending they wanted. It’s childish and it’s so bloody entitled I don’t even know where to start. Yes I do - these are the kind of people who started or signed an actual real petition to try to get someone to re-write the ending of Game of Thrones because they didn’t like it. How bloody self-centred do you have to be to genuinely believe that just because you didn’t think it measured up, that you get to demand it be redone to be somehow ‘better’? How entitled are you? How far are you up your own arse? Someone wrote that and someone helped edit it. People produced and filmed and costumed and catered and rigged and lit and worked bloody hard to bring it to the screen. And what happened? People turned around and shat on everyone because they didn’t get the death they wanted, or the fight they wanted, or the satisfaction they craved. As Bobby says, “boo-friggin’-hoo”. It wasn’t made for just you - sometimes you just don’t get what you want and you have to step back and let it go. If someone gives you a birthday present and you open it in front of them to find that it’s not what you want or even like, you don’t throw it at them and insult them for it, you accept it and say thank you because that person made an effort. You don’t have to like the present, but you should have the fucking manners and self-respect to thank them and move on. No-one’s asking you to keep the present, or to tell everyone you like it - you don’t have to say you don’t like it, and everything is fine. It amazing how many people just cannot grasp that simple concept.

It’s not the way I wanted the show to go out. It’s not the way I want the cast and crew to be treated. It’s not how a fandom should behave. It’s beneath us and it’s ugly. I am ashamed of the fandom and how they’ve acted - and are still acting. To preserve my own sanity in these trying times of Covid and global madness, I can only conclude that these people are not fans. It’s not much, but it’s something.

The End

On top of all that shitshow, there’s the knowledge that this is The End. No more new episodes. No more new adventures. No more sounds of the Impala’s doors squeaking, that little rattle it made just under the dialogue. No more witty comebacks, slip-ups, dressing-downs, bitch fights, machetes, desperate Hail Marys, strained allegiances and tested friendships.

As I look back over the past fifteen years, at all the fun I’ve had at conventions, writing forums, rewatch parties, it brings happy tears to my eyes. I must be getting old. But those were good times - all of them, even the badly-run Rogue Events conventions, the arguments about spelling on those writing forums, the mismatched time zones during those rewatches. A bad day with Supernatural was better than some of my good days, for so many reasons. It was comfort, it was ease, it was familiarity. It’s been a long time since I’ve been to a convention; you need to mortgage most of your organs to be able to afford a ticket to a Creation con these days, before paying for hotels and flights. It’s been a long time since I’ve been part of a writing forum; these days it’s all Wordpress and AOOO but it means it’s fragmented, it’s so open and wide-ranging that it’s no longer our corner of the internet. Instead of one person curating an archive of all the best we have to offer, now it’s just a filter on AOOO. This is not a bad thing, it’s just how things change. It’s been a long time since I’ve done a rewatch; those people aren’t available any more, or their time zone is now even further from mine. The pack has broken up, the people scattered over the globe in a way that only time can do. So gradually that no-one noticed, it all became so spread out, so far between that it wasn’t until I tried to get in touch with people that I realised it was too late.

Where are you when I need you, Hell Bus?

But then I realise: the more things change, the more they stay the same. Yes, the show will have no new episodes. But that doesn’t mean there won’t be conventions till the whole platform itself ceases to be a thing. We still have social media and groups, niche follows and tags. We still have AOOO and FF dot net, Wordpress and Wattpad. It feels like we’ve gone into our fifteenth hiatus, only this time there’s no end date in sight.

That’s the most encouraging thing I think I’ve heard since I watched the finale.

And I think that’s all I’ve got. It’s wet, it’s windy, it’s 12 degrees C and we’re into day 250 since my part of the world went into a Covid spiral of working from home / Tier 3 / national lockdown. However, I have a lot of memories and good times to think about, and I choose to do that rather than focus on the arseholes who have made a dumpster fire out of the series finale. I’m opening my SPN playlist and playing it loud.

Take care, everyone.

Lockdown

Not, unfortunately, the stellar (sorry) Guy Pierce 2012 film Lockout, which is just a fantastic old-fashioned 1980s survival in a prison (a space prison) flick with guns, violence, snarky one-liners and brilliantly acted stereotypes all round. No, sadly not that Lockout.

Instead it’s now been seven weeks since I’ve worked from my actual work desk, and three weeks since I’ve left the house. And by that I mean I have not crossed the threshold of any doors to be away from the touch of indoor flooring.

Everyone keeps asking - “how are you holding up?”. And my reply is always the same: “has anything changed?”


I mean yes, obviously some things have changed. I don’t go to the pictures on Saturday and then meet up with mates afterwards to talk about it. I don’t go to the Chinese supermarket one Sunday a month to stock up on food. I don’t go to the archery range. I don’t drive to work. Other than that…? Nah, nothing’s changed.

I don’t have kids, pets, or anything that distracts me. What I do have is Doom Eternal on PS4, along with other games I’m still battling through. I have Netflix and Amazon Prime, I have Kodi and Hong Kong dramas (The Exorcist’s 2nd Meter is on - finally we have the sequel to The Exorcist’s Meter!). I have a Lethal Weapon fanfiction story that I’m halfway through posting, and I’ve embarked on a 21 day yoga shred class online. And did I forget to mention, I’m still working, just from the kitchen table. So yeah, I’m pretty busy and I don’t need to go out. My housemate is also still working, but their essential worker status means that they can stop off at a supermarket on the way home and pick up bits and pieces.

Also, I work in payroll (for the NHS, no less), so what with April being a perfect storm of all the statutory and contractual changes no-one in ops wants, it’s been a full-on, fifty-hour week for four weeks for pretty much the entire team. We’ve been given time off in lieu, so it’s not really a big deal for me, but for others with dependents it’s been “a nightmare”.

The only problem I’m going to have is going back to the office when we’re finally cleared by our bosses to do so (i.e. when our healthcare professionals have assessed it and made the requisite changes, not when Boris waffles his way through saying… whatever it was he was saying on Sunday 10th March). I know a lot of people will be glad of the return - to be in a place where they feel like a professional, like they’re away from all the home distractions, out of the ‘home’ environment and into a work headspace. I get it - in words. I don’t feel it, but I understand what they mean. And then there are those who don’t work in office jobs and will have been itching to get back to work for the last month anyway.

Everyone seems uptight and upset that they’re being told to stay home. Everyone else seems to be getting cabin fever. I’ve just woken up one day, been told to collect my kit from work and then go home until further notice, get on MS Teams when I’m working and that’s that. I just kind of went “so this is how it is now” and got on with it. There wasn’t any drama to be had - it just happened and we dealt with it like grown-ups. Others in the team had some IT hiccups and others have been trying to balance kids and dinner-time and all kinds of trials and tribulations. I don’t have those. I sit down, open up all the apps and emails and everything else, look at the list of stuff I didn’t finish yesterday, and get to work. I don’t see the difference between doing that at work and doing that at my kitchen table.

I’m happy that I don’t have to mix with humans, that I can get on and do my job without being interrupted by co-workers asking if I want to go for a brew, or having to put shoes on (I find it hard to sit on chairs ‘properly’ and often end up folding my legs under the table, which is hard to do with Doc Martens on).

Going back to an office environment is going to be very hard.

But then, what with major companies now wondering why they’re paying rent or a bank loan for sprawling offices in the real world when they could just let their office staff keep a laptop and stay away, I wonder what changes are coming.

Was it not Captain Jack Harkness who said that “the 21st century is when everything changes”? Is this what he meant? Where leaders of large, influential countries have gone off the rails (some would argue that they were never really on them in the first place) and caused nearly 80,000 deaths at this point? Where still others are trying to impose their brand of order on a territory handed back to them twenty-odd years ago, despite the entire population being against it and willing to stand in tear gas and water cannon to prove it? With this new pandemic hitting the globe and reminding everyone how everyone really is connected whether they like it or not, is this when everything finally starts to shift? Pollution from fossil-fuel traffic in a lot of cities has started to ease up - because of people not using those vehicles. One retired army captain (now a colonel) in the UK has raised more for NHS Charities in a few weeks than most people will ever raise in their lifetime - in a team. People are reaching out over social media, children are receiving tweets and replying by old-fashioned letter-writing. Others are holding street parties from behind their fences. Still more are coming out onto their doorsteps to celebrate the NHS on a Thursday night with songs, clapping, and banging pots and pans. Caremongering is becoming a thing - people helping others to get their grocery shopping, to post a letter, to connect and keep their sanity. All signs are pointing toward a feeling of unity, of wanting to help.

And yet.

And yet.

We have brainless, self-obsessed presidents telling the masses the most baseless, misinformed and dangerous things - and nearly half the country are still listening to him. We have others over-buying and stocking up on household items so that they can sell those items for a profit. People think they can get away with behaving like Nazis again. There are people deliberately scamming others using miracle cures and snake oil replacements for this virus. There are news outlets deliberately spreading lies and paranoia, to widen the gap between classes, between minorities, between neighbours, between humans. The top ten multi-billionaires just keep getting richer, earning more per day than they could spend in a month, and apparently happy to keep it that way despite the people all around them living on food stamps, foods banks, charity hand-outs and poverty.

This is what we are as a species. We are opposite ends of the spectrum, in all things. The only thing wrong with that is how far apart those ends actually are. It’s ok that everyone believes different things, it’s ok that everyone feels differently, acts differently, has a different perspective. This is essential for humans to survive. What’s not ok is how some seek to stop others from being allowed to be the difference. Some leaders need to be impeached (or just removed forcibly with a blunt object), some leaders need to realise the way their country has been run for the past few generations just isn’t going to work any more - times have changed and not changing with them is not how evolution or progress works. Some people need to get a heart, or at least hire someone who has one and then take their advice. I am the last person to say they know anything about empathy or feelings, but even I can stand back and work out what is beneficial and what isn’t to a society as a whole. When you work toward controlling a population instead of serving them, you’ve already lost the game.

Anyway.

Some good news to lighten the mood: NASA is going back to the Moon. To date, one person has definitely been cured of HIV, and while science is struggling to replicate the how, they’re getting closer every day. Volvo is looking to get into the Tesla bracket of electric cars - meaning the battle is now on (properly) for better, longer-ranging batteries and smaller price tags. And on that note, the production of energy from renewable sources is literally terawatts ahead of anything it’s ever been before. Wind farms alone are making an impact on the amount of energy we have to import, including Russian coal and Norwegian oil.

When all this covid thing is over, and everyone goes back to work in stages, it’s not the lockdown or the whinging or the team spirit I’m going to remember. It’s the good movies I’ve seen, the comic books I’ve read, the stories I’ve written and the courses I’ve done. I’ve let myself watch more on Netflix and it’s resulted in me seeing some very good series I wouldn’t normally have tried out. I’ve gone for that yoga course even though I don’t understand yoga (you can still go through the motions like you mean it, though). I’ve had a whale of a time in the rip and tear moments of Doom Eternal and I’ve got my highest scores ever on the arcade levels of Doom 2016.

I know all around me people have been losing their shit and things have been going off the rails, but for me life’s been pretty good. As an INTJ who really isn’t here for Human Drama, I have to say I’ve been enjoying this lockdown as a chance to stay away from people. If there was a way for it to continue, without the horrific deaths or riots or protests (against people trying to keep them alive? Fine. Let them die) then I’m all for it. We just need to beat this virus and make something new out of what comes next. And if a majority doesn’t get rid of the orange-faced buffoon spewing arse-gravy on the daily when next they vote, then we may just have to call on the SAS to do everyone a huge fucking favour.

You’ll be glad to know that that’s it for today, folks. Rant over - time for more good telly.

Soopytwist.

Final image by Free-Photos from Pixabay

The Superhero Desk

Payrollers, as anyone outside the industry will most definitely not tell you, are superheroes. We deliver on time, every time, by solving other people’s problems, making things happen despite everyone else’s mission to sabotage delivery by deadlines, and making the hard choices to save the world.

We’re invisible. We can toil away with a metric tree-tonne of timesheets, grapple with statutory pay loopholes and convince obstreperous software to just work, and like ninjas, no-one will see us do it. In fact, we’re completely, effectively, and in all other ways non-existent.

Until something goes wrong.

We’re payrollers, yes, but we’re also human. We are not infallible and sometimes we just make mistakes. But when other people make mistakes, it results in a box of ballpoint pens not turning up at reception, or a car being delivered to the wrong address the first time round. When we make mistakes, employees’ bills don’t get paid, direct debits bounce, cars go without petrol and people don’t get to work. It’s nothing short of the end of their world as they know it.

That’s when we move heaven and earth to bring payment to people seemingly effortlessly. Does that mean we save the world on a daily basis? You bet we do. I’ve seen it; I’ve done it.

Let me tell you a story.

We have a small team where I work. One of our payrollers, whose penchant for wearing dark colours that contrast her red hair and her ability to get things done without anyone noticing has earned her the nickname ‘Batwoman’, takes a phone call from a woman at 9:27am on pay day. The woman claims to be an employee and is demanding to know why she hasn’t been paid. Batwoman checks - there’s no record of her in our payroll-cum-HR system. Unwilling to share this distressing news, Batwoman takes down details with her namesake’s trademark calm and promises to call the woman back when she’s got to the bottom of the problem.

Her first stop: HR, whereupon she’s told that the woman is half set-up in the system but they’re waiting on being notified of her working her first day.

A-ha, says Batwoman, but she has worked her first day. It was 15th of the month.

Bother, says HR, as this is one day before the cut-off, which means she is due payment and HR really should have been made aware.

At this point it becomes obvious what has happened - or more accurately, what hasn’t happened. The moment she had worked her first day, the woman’s details should have been updated with HR and they could have finished setting her up in the system and then passed her starter paperwork to Payroll so we could add her to the pay run. The villain of the piece had been revealed, sadly not Scooby-Doo style, to be the line manager who had not informed anyone of the woman’s first day at work.

Batwoman is told that HR cannot sort the paperwork problem at the moment as they’re dealing with any one of the other 1,200 employees and their own little versions of armageddon - it could be 2 or 3 days before they can get to sorting it out.

Batwoman goes back to her desk, calmly picks up the phone and manages to get through to the line manager herself. Line manager says nuh-uh, too busy, and attempts to fob her off.

You can imagine how this went down.

Batwoman gets up, picks up a notebook and pen, and goes into one of the offices, kept available for just such an eventuality. She closes the glass, sound-proof door and sits down at the solitary desk and phone, in full view of everyone due to the ceiling-to-floor glass nature of the ‘wall’ of the office.

What is said is not known. What is caused to happen most definitely is; within ten minutes of coming back to her own desk, Batwoman has been emailed the pertinent paperwork, with HR copied in, so that the employee can be paid. She adds her to the run, rolls her for next month as this one is shut, and makes a same-day advance payment to the employee.

The satisfaction in her voice as she calls the employee back and gives her the news that she will receive money in the next hour is palpable. But when the employee thanks her over and over, she gives the same answer she gives everyone; “it’s what we’re here for”.

The satisfaction in her voice as she tells the Finance department, across the office, that the cost of making a same-day payment is coming out of a certain line manager’s budget is also palpable. An incident report is filed to explain the expense and also to give us something to try to avoid next time.

For the employee, the world was saved. For Payroll, we were left cleaning up a manager’s error on that day and also dealing with the advance in the next month. But Batwoman was right - it is what we’re here for. We are where the buck stops, where the thin blue line is drawn, where the chips hit the table.

Even when other departments or people fail, when we just don’t have the things we need, when it’s not our place to do it, we are still expected to produce money for people. Most of the time, we do. Batwoman took that call at 9:27am (the reason I know this is because we take bets on when the first complaint call or email will come in each pay day, and we all lost) and by noon it had been resolved to the employee’s satisfaction. She didn’t need to know the whys and wherefores - all she needed was the money she was owed. We did that; we made it happen. Everything else was something for line managers and Finance Directors to argue about after the fact. Luckily for us.

I like Batwoman; we get on. We’re both a ‘is it a 0 or a 1? No, it can’t be a 0.5; try again’ kind of person. And when we were getting fresh tea an hour after the miraculous advance payment had landed, we joked about how she’d saved another person’s world in record time.

Of course, the background superhero, the Alfred Pennyworth to all of our efforts, was the Payroll Manager. She made damn sure the reason (and expense) why Batwoman’s latest escapade had even happened was brought to the attention of all line managers (with names withheld to protect the guilty) at the next meeting.

Give us what we need, she told them, and we will deliver every time. And apparently, we deliver even when we’re not given what we need.

Superheroes are just like that, I suppose.

What is this GDPR thing anyway?

If like me you work with details of living people, then you must have at least heard of the GDPR. The General Data Protection Regulation, which comes into force 25th May 2018, is basically an upgraded version of the Data Protection Act 1998 (Stephen Fry rest its soul). What does it mean? Well on top of getting all the usual stuff (people have to ask to collect your data; have to tell you why they’re collecting it and how long they’ll keep it; they can't share it or let it get lost; they can only get data from you in the first place if they actually need it for something, etc.) we get some shiny new rights. Things like telling a company they have to ‘forget’ you (as in shred or delete every single bit of data they hold on you, unless it means they can’t provide the service for which you’ve given it), and a shorter (and free) period of time to request a copy of all the info someone has on you, are quite useful in the long run and I have to say it’s high time we had this tightening of legislation.

But what does it actually mean? I’ve been on 2 courses now for work; the CIPP GDPR for Payroll course and a government accredited IT Governance GDPR course. It’s a pretty dry subject, but it’s well worth the read. The consequences of a breach of protected data at your company or business are one thing, but if you're not even aware of what constitutes a breach and what you’re supposed to do about it, things get very bad very quickly.

Take for example a typical Tuesday morning for me.

Colleague: I can’t get in the restricted-access personnel folder.

Me: Yes.
Colleague: Well I need to get in.
Me: There’s a reason you don’t have access to that folder. What are you trying to do?

Colleague: I just want to look something up.
Me: No.
Colleague: What?
Me: NO. As in ‘no’.
Colleague: But I need it.
Me: If you can demonstrate why, then I’ll get you the necessary information.
Colleague: Do I wait here?
Me: Buses don’t stop here.
Colleague: What?
Me: I don’t know why else you’d be waiting here.
Colleague: Well for access.
Me: Let’s skip a lot of misunderstanding, shall we? You need to show me first why you have a right to see the information. Then, and only then, can I give it to you.
Colleague: You’re taking this a bit far.
Me: *cups hands around mouth and shouts* Does anyone want to see the contents of Colleague’s file? It might have juicy information in it, like any grievances they’ve brought against you, or if they’re divorcing anyone, or how many kids they’re claiming childcare vouchers for - and their surnames! Anyone? Anyone?
Office: *sounds of giggles, general hand-waving of amusement and negation*
Colleague: Stop that. You can’t just show people my stuff.
Me: So you DO understand data protection, then?
Colleague: But I need access.
Me: No. What you need is to ask me for the PIECE or PIECES of information you need, and I’ll get it for you.
Colleague: Well why do you have access and I don’t? I’m a manager. You’re just a—
Me: Steady. I pay your wages into your private bank account, don’t forget.
Colleague: I was only going to say that you’re not manager level.
Me: Data protection doesn’t care about your manager level. I need your private details in order to do my job, which is pay you and create and maintain your personnel records. People sitting next to me in HR do NOT pay you, so they don’t have access to things I do, even though they’re also in HR. Directors of the company don’t have access to it either, because they don't need it to do their jobs. See how it works?
Colleague: This is going to take forever.
Me: It is if you keep going on about it. Just email me with the request for information and I’ll see if I can release it all. If I can’t, I’ll release everything I can.
Colleague: You mean even if I ask nicely I still might not get it?
Me: Correct. The same way that if someone asked me very very nicely for your personal bank details, I would say ‘no, it’s against GDPR principles’. See?
Colleague: So… how do I get the information? Can HR get it for me?
Me: No. For all the reasons I’ve just said.
Colleague: This is political correctness gone mad.
Me: *cups hands around mouth and shouts* Colleague wants to waive their right to all data protection! Who wants to trawl through their file!
Office: *more giggles, more hand-waving of amusement and negation*
Colleague: You can’t do that!
Me: You just said it was going too far. What you mean is, it’s only going too far when YOU want something FROM someone else. Are you going to go away and email me a request? I have things to do.
Colleague: You’re not being very helpful.
Me:

To make matters worse, this person has actually sat through a 1 hour introduction to GDPR and done the mandatory online test afterwards - and must have scored at least 75% or they would be on my hit-list of people who need to complete it before 25th May 2018.

So this person - Fuckwit, let’s just call them Fuckwit - decides to go over my head to the GDPR working group we have. Because we have less than 250 employees we don’t need to employ a Data Protection Officer (DPO), so instead we have a group of people, one from each department, to get shit done. Fuckwit goes to make a cup of tea and tells another colleague all about it. This second colleague, full of themselves because they read an article online once, decides that Fuckwit has indeed been slighted and goes with them to lodge a complaint. So Fuckwit and - let’s call them Chucklefuck - go off together to see the person in the GDPR working group who has the final advisory decision on who gets to see sensitive data (bearing in mind that sensitive data is even more protected than normal personal data).

Fuckwit and Chucklefuck go upstairs and speak to (or rather, whinge to) someone they think can help. They tell them in no uncertain terms that actually, the one person who can advise on sensitive data issues is the only person in the company who has to work with it all day, and is therefore the only person who gets to see it or dispense it.

You get to guess who that person is.

Yes, Fuckwit and Chucklefuck have to come back down to my desk and ask me nicely to see data. I tell them again that they have to ask me in writing, and give the reasons they ‘need’ it. Because if their need isn’t a genuine requirement of completing the job for which the data was given, then the answer will again be no.

You can guess how happy they were to hear this.

They refused to write the email and said they would complain to ‘some kind of ombudsman’. I gave them the website address for the ICO who regulates all this and said I would welcome their contact with the regulatory body in charge of checking and fining people for breaches, and of course a bit of guidance from the European Commission.

They went away happy and I was happy they went away.

So there’s that.

But it’s really not that hard; the old ways of sharing stuff across offices, not even checking to see if it’s relevant or if you’re sharing stuff no-one else it supposed to see, are over. (And don’t under any circumstances share anything with the USA under their Privacy Shield - it's nowhere near the same and nowhere near as water-tight.) Privacy by design (systems that are built in such a way that they have security in every step), auditing access to info and controlling it, maintaining an effort to keep it controlled - these are all things that may seem boring and soul-destroyingly convoluted to most people, but they make up about 80% of being compliant with GDPR. When the very worst breaches in the hugest companies can attract a fine of up to €20billion, showing you’ve tried to mitigate any breach, and then how you’ve installed a better lock on the gate after the horse has bolted so it won't happen again, can really make all the difference.

And that’s pretty much it for today. At some point I’ll have to regale you with the most ridiculous email queries I’ve had just this week - honestly, some of them make you wonder how these people get their trousers on in the morning.

Soopytwist.