The Labyrinth Index (Laundry Files, #9)

by Charles Stross

Opening the files on a computer with an internet connection isn’t recommended either. But sometimes there are advantages to working for the government, like having a wide selection of laughably obsolete office equipment to play with, and Big Al has set the team up with an ancient PowerPC Macintosh with a USB interface so sluggish that it took two hours to slurp a gigabyte of scans onto the machine’s whirring hard disk, and a processor so obsolete and weird that any modern malware that lands on it dies instantly, unable to even run. One brainless, non-networked laser printer later, they have a printout.

The besetting vice of high office is the temptation to micromanage, to take direct control of a small, concrete, easily understood subsidiary operation and start issuing orders, to the detriment of the chain of command (and the neglect of the big picture). The reason micromanagement is a vice is that it’s a temptation to self-indulgence: it’s too easy to get carried away.