The four seasons of a virtual machine

Computerworld -

It's happening again: Spring has arrived, the birds are coming back, and I've got the light and happy feeling that the color of my paycheck will be changing soon. Maybe it's the way the sun stays longer over afternoon coffee with corporate expatriates and recruiters. Or perhaps it's the morning dew settling on the window as yet another executive on the other end of the speakerphone spins last fall's dead leaves into this spring's fertilizer.

It's a happy season for the cynical, when the "I told you sos" come into full bloom as fresh winds encourage migration to more fertile hills. With an understated parting crow, we shed our winter coats, tuck a few nesting branches under a wing and take flight. I expect sometime in the coming weeks, I'll be having one of those plaintive exit interviews, make the appropriate dips and bows in the corporate dissolution dance, and finally go through the ritual return of assets.

It'll be different this year, though. You see, I don't have much to give them. Shhh. Don't tell the corporate hawks, but I haven't used their corporate-issued laptop in years.

Last summer

How can this be? When I came into my current corporate environment, the support savants cracked open a high-end laptop, installed all the latest office and security software, as well as management tools to push antivirus updates and a homing beacon to verify patches. They configured and tested, then packed it up and shipped it to me. Within a couple of days, I'd logged in, monkeyed around with a few settings, reinstalled some software by giving the help desk control through a WebEx session, and got up and running on what appeared to be wobbly newborn corporate legs. But that laptop is still in its box under my desk.

The problem is, I like my job. Were my interests and career sung to two different tunes, I might have a desktop computer at work -- a system that I shut down and left at the end of each day, with a separate one at home for e-mail and games. But I live out of my computer. Work, reading, research, this column, test projects, pictures of interesting work locations, e-mails to and from my wife during the workday, and all other manner of data end up on my computer.

Early on, I didn't worry much about the occasional personal use of a work computer, and the resultant commingling of data. I was never foolish enough to leave embarrassing files for co-workers to find or to download porn at work, nor had I the inclination to send hostile e-mails to ex-girlfriends or bomb threats to competitors. But despite this quaint and innocent existence, I managed to accumulate a fair collection of personal documents, pictures and other files on my work computer.