Glossary

DREADFUL.WORK: GLOSSARY

Dreadful Work

The term "Dreadful Work" refers to a state of negative anticipation in which an employee expects their work to be painful, frustrating, or a waste of time, often manifesting as a heavy knot in the stomach upon waking. This feeling is distinct from simple fatigue and is frequently linked to emotional exhaustion, burnout, or a discrepancy between personal values and work duties.

Talpone

To make you understand what is meant by a Talpone, I won't provide a definition because it wouldn't do it justice. Instead, I'll show you a conversation from my company:

[Me]: So, are we going to spin up that machine, or do we have to wait another few months?
[Infrastructure Manager]: No, you're asking for port 51820, it's not a standard port.
[Me]: Of course it's a standard port, it's used to establish a Mesh VPN with the Netbird stack. I even wrote that in the ticket.
[I.M.]: Absolutely not, it violates corporate security policies.
[Me]: You do realize that corporate security policies are set by my department, and specifically, I'm the one who approves them, right? If I'm asking for it, it's because it doesn't violate any policies.
[I.M.]: I don't care, I want the written approval of the CISO.
[Me]: So you're telling me that if I had asked for port 443/tcp outbound, there wouldn't have been any problems, but because I asked for 51820/udp you're giving me shit.
[I.M.]: Of course, 443 is standard.
[Me]: Fine, next time I'll ask for port 443 inbound, so you won't bust my balls. And right behind it, I'll drop a massive talpone, and you can explain how, despite respecting corporate policies, you ended up with half the datacenter encrypted.
[I.M.]: Is this how the head of security is supposed to talk?!
[Me]: No, this is how the guy who wrote the policies talks. And if you actually read them just once, you'd see we never mention ports, only allowed protocols.