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Notes -
It’d be impractical to do that here where I am. The parks and recreation guys I’ve come across are jackasses with the lone exception of one of them. Maybe I can’t entirely blame them. Even the good side of the neighborhood has people vandalizing the grounds on the regular, so they’re always painting over the play structures and facilities. If you showed up one day with your hardware and just started making changes to things, you’d spark the ire of them in their trucks rolling up on you. No doubt.
I have stories of doing this at different jobs in the past. Looking back on it, some of the “fixes” I’ve implemented probably could’ve got me fired, not because they were dangerous or crossed some serious boundary, but it would definitely raise more than a few eyebrows and make people very suspicious. But you have to improvise when you’re not empowered to do your job. Shadow IT for instance has been a great worry of companies for a very long time. But when you’re on a shoestring budget and you get treated as an afterthought, what can you do?
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