Where, oh where, to implant my employee microchip?
Swipe to open the toilet door – and swipe again
TRIGGER WARNING
The paywall cometh. From next week, Autosave is for Wimps will switch to a paid subscription model. It’s been 3+ years since I launched this newsletter off the back of my 10-year weekly column at The Register and now enough faithful readers have assured me it would be OK if I start passing round a hat for pennies. More details soon in Notes.
“Work out loud,” a prospective new employer once told me during a job interview.
I nodded wisely. Of course, of course, work out loud, yes that’s it, I repeated to myself, inwardly and silently. I stifled a snort with a theatrical cough.
“We are a team,” she continued, “not a family”. I maintained my best poker face but could sense my left eyebrow raising by itself. Sister Sledge are not on the interview shortlist, I deduced.
When I first entered the work market in the 1980s, the prevailing language of corporate bullshit rolled its tongue around paradigm-shifting and envelope-pushing. Post-millennium, we talk about high-bandwidth collaboration and It’s OK to fail.
Come to think about it, my prospective employer did say something about “failing quickly and cheaply”. Earlier, she pontificated that “failure breeds success”. Evidently failure was the key skill they were looking for in an employee. I’m their man.
I went well-prepared for this onslaught of interview gibberish: I grew some stubble, put on a circa-2016 hipster lumberjack shirt, boned up on my IT certifications just in case and, most important of all, learnt the language of corporate culture decks. (Everything I needed to master modern marketspeak for the digital era was to be found in Culture Decks Decoded by Brett Putter.)
My interviewer went on to talk about “pseudo-harmony” and invited me to be “a no-ego doer”. My left eyebrow kept rising, making its way towards the back of my head.
It was when she advised me to “date the model, marry the mission” that I realised I wouldn’t be able to keep up the pretence in such a workplace for more than five minutes. My interviewer then fell silent and stared at me. Possibly she was trying to gauge a reaction. Or it could have been that she was shaken by my explosive yell of laughter.
She wished me a good day.
No worries, I thought, there are plenty of other organisations out there who'll pay me handsomely to fail for them – quickly, cheaply and even frequently if that's what's required.
At the time, I was only a recent convert to the Church of Failure. Previously, I regarded failure as undesirable and unnecessary, almost as if it would be preferable not to fail. Yes, I know! So naïve. But back then, my LinkedIn profile would list items under the ‘Work Experience’ heading thus:
Provided consultancy to major newspaper group on how to maximise digital publishing productivity at minimal cost
Was ignored
Watched helplessly as six-figure sum poured needlessly into incompetent alternative system that inevitably failed
Left company to work elsewhere
Those who instigated embarrassing disaster received promotion
Much later, I finally got the picture: bosses can forgive and even admire a brave failure, no matter how avoidable. And more to the point, absolutely nobody likes a smart arse.
These days, I understand the practical need to make a mess of things, spectacularly and expensively if necessary, to further one's career. My problem is that I don't yet feel ready to embrace failure on a personal level.
When I say “personal”, I mean it literally. For example, I have never been keen on the implantation of RFID microchips into employees’ hands to avoid the need for office security access swipe cards and the like. This was a thing genuinely being mooted – oh yes – around the time of the aforementioned job interview.
Socially disturbing? Meh, I’m not bothered about that. Morally reprehensible? Doesn’t bother me. Misery, complaint, self-pity, injustice? Whatever. My objection was simply that I just know for a fact that the chip they insert into my hand will inevitably go tits up. They may as well insert it into my tits in the first place.
Sooner or later – probably sooner, and without any doubt whatsoever – the chip will either stop working altogether or it’ll self-enable a hidden routine that switches from standard RFID Mode into Total Buggeration Mode.
Embracing failure is literal when the failed item is 4mm beneath the surface of your skin.
Do you use an RFID card to unlock security doors or release gates at your workplace? Do they work every time? Of course they bloody don’t. Half the time, you’re stuck at the door, flourishing your card impotently across the sensor from different directions again and again, watching the red light flash repeatedly with an accompanying ugly audio bleat, as you duly recite the workplace mantra: “Open-the-fuck-up-you-stupid-fucking-fucked-fucker”.
Being able to waving my microchip-implanted hand over this sensor does not seem to offer any obvious advantage over holding a card if neither method works.
And unlike those stupid card-keys that they give you in hotels – the ones that fail after just two uses, assuming they work at all – you couldn’t just nip down to reception to get them to rebeam the chip (or rewrite the strip) with your room number. Likewise in the workplace you wouldn’t be able simply to rock up to the security manager’s office and ask for a ID card replacement.
Instead, you’d have to join a lengthy queue for an appointment at the blood-splattered door of the workplace surgeon, who will gouge out the failed chip from between your thumb and forefinger with a pair of pliers, insert a new one using a bent coat hanger and sew your hand back up with dental floss. You'll have to do this roughly every two weeks, if my experience of security access ID cards is anything to go by.
If I want proof of how glitchy such a system is, I just observe my cat going out for a crap.
She is microchipped at the back of her neck, you see. The microchip triggers the electronic release mechanism on the cat flap, so that my cat is the only furry animal that can use it to enter the house. But it doesn’t always work. Sometimes it takes her several testy paw-pokes and headbutts before the bolt clicks back and lets her in.
This means we know each time she’s re-entering the house in the middle of the night because of all the noise as she kicks and scratches and meows in frustration, her wailing probably the feline equivalent of “Open-the-fuck-up-you-stupid-fucking-fucked-fucker”. One day she'll give up going out altogether and take a dump on my pillow instead.
I have a lot of sympathy for my cat’s interrupted excretion regime because I have been in almost exactly the same situation myself. The security card with which I’d been issued on a contracting job consistently failed to let me though to the office toilets.
On one occasion, I had been busy and perhaps let things, er, ‘mount up’ before deciding that a visit to the Gents was too urgent to put off any longer. I ended up sprinting across the open-plan floor only to end up performing the squirm-dance with flailing arms at the exit as the RFID sensor determinedly refused to acknowledge my card.
Perhaps I should have acted like my cat: either pee out the nearest window or take a shit on the security manager’s chair.
Embedding such a failure-ridden technology semi-permanently into my body tissue is too insane to contemplate. Not only is the convenience value vastly overrated (since it only works some of the time), any perceived security benefits are purely imaginary. Sure, I'm less likely to leave my hand behind on a train seat or allow someone to steal my arm than I would lose an ID card, but I can’t just tuck my hands away when I'm not using them to open a door. Usually my hands are waggling in front of me quite a lot, doing other stuff. That’s a security issue right there.
As Martin Jartelius, CSO of Outpost24, put it: “The very location of a microchip in your hand may actually lead to increased exposure, as the hands form the basis of our physical interaction with our surroundings.”
In other words, there's nothing secure about waving your unshielded security ID device around all day in public view – at work, at home, and while commuting between the two.
Not to worry. I’m sure someone will conjure an alternative, better hidden body location for my security implant. And if it’s to unlock the office toilet quickly with a simple gesture, I think I know just the place to implant it.
Alistair Dabbs is a freelance technology tart, juggling tech journalism, training and digital publishing. He was reminded of his time freelancing for PC Magazine when the editors refused to upgrade his ID photocard to unlock the door of the PC Mag hardware testing labs. After a few frustrating attempts to plead entry by hammering at the door and shouting, he found he could silently slip in and out unnoticed by pushing his unsophisticated old ID card through a gap between the Yale lock and the door frame.
Not to mention the on- and off-boarding process suddenly getting a lot weirder and longer.
But I'm surprised this idea is receiving any consideration, just on cost factors. It can't be cheaper to have an appropriately qualified person implanting RFID chips into new employees' hands than it is to replace lost cards/fobs every now and then.
Futurama-style career chips actually make MORE sense than this idea. Perhaps by the year 3000 the reliability of RFID chips and readers will have improved.
It has always been my understanding the reason executive shitters were so heavily protected against unauthorised access was because that is where the deep arts of C.Y.A. were taught which are not, of course, available to us mere mortals.
As for granting employee access, simple, don't. Let the buggers work from home and use their own (non-expensable nor tax deductible) Kleenex.