During my tenure in New Jersey the office I worked in was a multi-tenant two story building. The company I worked for had leased a number of suites in the building. Customer support and business offices were on the ground floor to the right, hardware, and shipping and receiving took up most of the basement, and the development offices were on the upper floor on the left. The other suites in the building included a dentist, and a few lawyers offices.

Given the lawyers offices men in suits were a common sight in the building, and had mostly faded into the background. One morning I rolled into the parking lot at about 8:55 for a 9am start as one does, I parked in the back next to the stair well, because it’s convenient for getting to the dev office but also the street facing parking lot is often a mess because that’s where the customers and casuals park. As I was settling into the parking lot I looked out the front window and noticed five men milling in the parking lot. Two of them were wearing suits, oh lovely lawyers, and three in Hawaiian shirts, oh what classy clients. I logged into my computer musing that some poor soul was about to have a really bad day.

Just as I was getting into the zone my phone rang, it was the extension from the support office, that’s a good start to the day, I’m sure whatever they were escalating this early was going to be a hot mess. “Good, mor – “, “Hey, I need you to come down to the main office right now. The US Marshals want to talk to you, also they’re pointing guns at us, so please hurry”, “What?” *click* I hustled out the suite door and down the front stairs. As I was coming across the building lobby, I could see across to the propped open front door of our suite, in our lobby the two of the three guys in Hawaiian shirt were sitting in chairs fiddling with cell phones, pistol grips clearly visible at their hips. Oh I guess those are the Marshals.

Stopping just short of the front door, I announced “Hello? Custodian of records, I heard someone was looking for me.” One of the Marshals nodded and pointed into the main support bullpen. I came around the corner to find the third Marshal standing next to the manager of the customer service department, and all of the support staff standing around the edge of the room well away from their computers. Good news he had holstered his weapon in the time it took me to run down stairs.

“We’re here to execute a court order, we need everyone to keep away from their computer until we can assess what’s relevant to the order. Our technical contractors are in the main conference, answer their questions and give them access to anything they ask for. If you have any questions, you can give this to your corporate counsel” The marshal said handing me a large file folder. “Customer service doesn’t have access to customer data, can we get them back to work while we sort this out?” I asked “Tell the contractors, and we’ll see what they say” came the curt reply. Right, I guess that’s all I’m going to learn here. I took my newly acquired novel and walked to the conference room.

“Uh, good morning, sorry about the Marshals, they stick to process and like guarantees. We couldn’t guarantee them you didn’t have any customer data on site.” One of the two gentlemen in a suit I saw earlier said sheepishly as I entered the room. “This is an office, not a datacenter, we don’t have any production data here. There’s a small dev lab in the basement, but no customers operate from the lab.” “Great, that’s exactly what I needed to hear” he said as he made his way out of the conference room.

The other contractor then gave me the run down on what they needed. They had a short list of VMs they needed archived and taken offline at a very specific time a few hours from now. The folder I was handed earlier was filled with all manner of documents, the court order itself they were executing, an NDA covering the specifics of what was being taken down and when, canned press releases talking about how great we were for participating in an important joint operation for the security of the internet as a whole, and reference copies of federal laws. The request itself was rather reasonable considering all of the theatrics that had happened so far.

The archiving went smoothly, this was a well honed process at this point. We finished up the collection process with about an hour to spare. With the bit of downtime before the big event of the day, I set to work on the fun process of reading and signing dozens of pages of legal documents. At the appointed time, we knocked the VMs offline, promised really hard we wouldn’t let them back online without further notice, and then sent the suits on their way with a hard drive full of fresh bits.

Wrapping up I went to talk to the support team to get their side of the story and more details about what the heck happened in the morning. The Marshals had come in loudly weapons drawn, they did at least announce they were federal agents and not just random dudes with guns (thanks I guess?) before telling everyone they needed everyone to step away from their computers. To further point out how half baked this was, the developers, who did have access to customer data were at the other end of the building none the wiser, they really did a good job of covering their bases here, sigh. When the tech left the conference room at the top of the process he went and told Marshal number three to chill there was no customer data on site and he didn’t need to baby sit the support techs, at which point he joined his compatriots in the lobby. It was a rather normal day after that, other than the men with guns sitting in the lobby playing Tetris on their phones.

I don’t miss that job at all.

---

Filed under: Auto-biographical - @ 2023-02-08 23:26

Tags: FridayNightStoryTime