For the last three months I haven’t been able to open some encrypted email. Day to day it’s not much of a problem, but once every two weeks or so part of my job really demands that I be able to see what’s lurking inside those emails. 

I started by putting in a help ticket with my employer’s vaunted Enterprise Service Desk. They fiddled with it for a week and finally decided it was something that needed handled locally, so I was referred over to their branch here in beautify northeastern Maryland. More days passed. Two hours on the phone with them later, they decided that the answer needed to be ever more local… and yet more days slipped away.

My local support worked at it for another two hours. More days trickled by with nothing happening. I raise the issue again. My boss raises the issue. Tech support and I play phone tag for a week. Then there was a holiday. And here we are three months later and I still can’t open the damned email and have to hope someone else who has access to that mailbox is around when I need to either read or send something encrypted. 

I raised the issue again today with our local support and ended up with people pointing in three different directions about who really needs to be working this issue.

Based on that feedback, the utter lack of progress made in three months, and my almost eighteen years of experience as a professional bureaucrat, I have now determined that I clearly don’t require access to these emails. If no one else is concerned with doing their job, I don’t suppose I need to be either. If Uncle wants me to have access, I suppose he’ll just have to miracle the right certificates onto my laptop because I’m well and truly done trying to get it done myself.