Unlinking Yourself From Future Training

(Part of my job involves working with secure data, so my job includes random trainings being assigned to us to review best practices for keeping data secure. One day, I get called into my boss’s office about those trainings.)

Boss: “IT was just complaining to me that you haven’t completed any of the last three trainings.”

Me: “I haven’t gotten notifications about any trainings in the last month or so. Do they still send out email notices for the trainings?”

Boss: “They do. They’re insisting that they’ve sent out multiple notices.”

Me: “I’ll go check.”

(I go through my email, searching for the notices, and I finally find one in my spam folder. After looking at it, I find out what the problem was.)

Me: *to my boss* “I found out why I wasn’t seeing their emails.”

Boss: “And?”

Me: “They were getting caught by the rules about ‘unknown links’ that IT insisted we set up in one of their earlier trainings.”

Boss: “Oh.”

(As it turns out, everyone who actually implemented that rule was also failing to get the notices, while those who had skipped it, such as my boss, were still getting the notices. If it had been deliberate, it would have been a good way of showing who actually followed those lessons and who didn’t. As it was, it was just due to the IT group not following their own rules about what constituted “safe emails.”)