I cannot fathom that someone in any job setting would think that it’s okay to use personal email for business.   Every company I’ve ever worked for has had explicit policy forbidding it.   To think that Hillary Clinton didn’t just do that, but had a whole email system in her house to run it, is just inexplicable.

For years I have fought over the argument that it’s a pain-in-the-butt to carry a device for personal stuff and one for business stuff.   I had the fight at MillerCoors over cell phones that I was able to obtain for folks and I had it at every consulting gig I’ve had.  At my current employer, we explicitly allow personal things on business systems, but that does not mean you can do business on personal systems.  See the distinction?

Today, I find the HuffPost article quoting Mrs. Clinton with this as her reasoning to use her personal email system instead of the State Department-provided one (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/03/10/hillary-clinton-email_n_6841218.html).   While I’m not saying that she did it to hide things, I know that folks have done this before, and I know that folks are looking for things in the past that were allowed to throw her under the bus for, I find it unbelievable that someone would think they even should do this.   ESPECIALLY the person at the top.

This is not, no matter how much Fox News wants to make it out to be, a “Clinton Thing”…it’s a product of our hierarchical management structure.   I know that the higher up you go in the corporate world or in the government world, the more you expect to be able to do what you want. In my opinion, the higher ups should actually be doing less of what they want and dealing with more of the BS that goes along with it.  Their accounts, emails, and everything else is much more important for the sake of the organization than the stuff the low-level person has access to.

I’ve known senior folks who have themselves exempted from password change policies, while everyone else has had to change passwords quarterly.   I’ve known management to have unlimited email storage on the systems, while everyone else was stuck with a small mailbox and actually not be able to send email because of it.   I know folks have different cell phone usage policies the higher up the chain they are.   I’ve known one company to set up a separate IT support system based in the US, just so the VPs and above don’t have to call India for their first-level support.

In every case, I find this behavior to be offensive and childishly entitled.   They feel they don’t have to eat their own dogfood and deal with the very policies they have pushed everyone else to need.  It actually insults me, and while I’ll still probably going to vote for Hillary down the road, I think she’s well-deserving of the heat that’s coming from this firestorm.