Violation

We interrupt the regularly scheduled broadcast of High School Memories for this important announcement. Whoever in my office felt the need to be poking around on my computer today at lunchtime needs to LEAVE MY MACHINE THE HELL ALONE!

When I came back from lunch today, I went to start up MS Word, when I noticed that it was already running. I am 100% certain I hadn't used it before lunch. I looked and saw 2 documents on my recent files list that had been opened on today's date. Both files were things I had on my desktop but hadn't even needed recently. The first was just some notes I had written prior to composing an email over a month ago. The second was a "lessons learned" follow up to a project I finished working on 6 months ago. So, as you can see, not any big deal, except for the fact that SOMEONE WAS USING MY MACHINE WITHOUT MY PERMISSION.

I've tried using screensaver password protection at past jobs, but I always found it annoying when the screensaver would popup and require my password when I was just sitting in front of my machine without interacting with it for 5 minutes. This would happen all the time, such as talking on the phone, having a conversation with a coworker walking by, or even reading some PDFs online.

Since our office requires a keycard anyway, I figured for security reasons, I didn't need to worry about being that secure. I started asking around, but no one saw anyone come into my cube at lunchtime. I immediately turned on my screensaver password protection and setup a hotkey to turn it on anytime I want to. I'm sure I'll get annoyed by having to type my password again and again, but after today, I feel violated.