Tuesday, July 29, 2003

I've been doing magic in the office.
Technically its illegal for muggles to perform any sort of magic, but I think the ministry of magic will let me go on this one (after all if we're talking about the MALAYSIAN ministry of magic here... it can't be that efficient... they'll probably send a warning to some poor confused fellow in kuala pillah on charges of being an unregistered bomoh).
I discovered this little bit of magic a few days ago when some trainees were talking about it over lunch. Here in Motorola, trainees aren't particularly nit-picky about hiding little secret spells that help them get their jobs done... and more importantly help to bide their boring hours while hiding from supervisors. This particular spell is called Ghostzilla. The purpose of the spell is to prevent supervisors from snooping on you to check that you aren't wasting precious company time surfing the net. But since I'm getting paid a measly salary, I can't be particularly bothered about doing things by the book here.
Using Ghostzilla is so easy, you'd swear it's magic... which it is, of course *ahem*. All I need is my magical mouse. Now, I could be working on my calculations in, say, Microsoft Excel, and once I'm sure that my supervisors aren't looking, I quickly flick my mouse left-right-left across the screen and voila! a browser pops up within my Excel screen. Now, my supervisors will still think I'm hard at work, doing my statistics, because if they just glance at me, they'll still be able to see the Excel Taskbar at the top of my screen. Meanwhile, my browser window has transformed into a black and white or grey scale document, so that from afar it looks like I'm still typing out my report. But if I hover my magical mouse pointer over my pictures, they turn coloured again. And if my supervisors suddenly decide to swoop down on me for a surprise visit, all I have to do is move my mouse pointer to the top of the screen and in the blink of an eye, my original work is restored with not a trace of my browser... even in the taskbar! And after my supervisor leaves, its left-right-left with the mouse again and my browser window appears just as I left it.
Now, isn't that simply magical?