Okay, well, it’s more prose than an ode. VirtualBox helped me keep my sanity in my first professional job after graduating university
I struggled to find a job after graduating university in 2017. When I finally got a job, I was hired as a receptionist at a law firm. Morning mail processing meant the afternoons were a lull. I wanted to be able to browse the internet without my personal information being saved on the receptionist desktop computer since it not only was a company computer, but it was also a computer that more than one person had easy access to.
I thought about creating a hidden user on the windows 10 dell workstation, but realized it would be easy to miss email requests sent to the receptionist user if I was doing personal stuff on a separate Windows 10 user account. I thought about installing a separate web browser, but then my personal cookies etc would be saved into the receptionist’s user account files.
In come Oracle Virtualbox. I had played with it on and off as a teenager, but none of the family computers were powerful enough to run virtualized instances. The receptionist workstation, however, being a business machine with an Intel I-7 with 32 gb of RAM meant I could run a virtualized instance of just about any linux distro easily in Oracle Virtualbox.
Almost a year into my tenure as receptionist, I changed roles/was promoted to being a paralegal. This meant I had to change desks and workstations. With the Virtualbox vdi, I just copy pasted it from one computer to the other and all my personal settings were unchanged.
When I left the company, I deleted the files and apps on the workstation. I think the receptionist workstation might still have the VirtualBox installed.
I don’t know if this manner of doing personal work on company computers truly escapes “BossWare”, especially if the BossWare tracks, monitors, and/or records whatever occurs on a worker’s screen. But my point is that I was able to do what I wanted without my personal information being saved and it was easily portable – and more importantly – easily encrypt-able and destructible.
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