Excessive load on NTP servers

I take it you've never dealt with jackass IT types.

They are very important people.

Im endlessly glad that my high school was extremely tolerant of us exploring the system and messing with things as long as we didn't try to cause harm (eg, deleting one file is okay, trashing a whole network drive is not) and reported what we found to the school IT manager. Most of us ended up as techs for the school and district as a student job. Several of those students went on to be whitehats. (Who knows where careers would've gone if they'd been discouraged and come to view the system as the enemy.)

They also were way cooler than they had to be about the several times we took down the network or broke the porn filters, or the time we port-scanned a district tech's machine, or had a whole collection of malware on the network drive, or....

I just worry about how students like me would fare in schools these days.

Yeah, I definitely agree with that to a large extent. That's why I stated that any career success I personally enjoy will be based on luck and/or accident instead of political skill. I've tried to bring myself to find some way to reconcile these paths and still feel that I'm not throwing away my integrity, but I've been having a hard time doing that. Trying to find that reconciliation has actually been a large part of my personal struggle over the last year or so.

I think the thing is that there are degrees here. A lot of the things that we are socialized to consider "bad taste" are not actually immoral and unfair (for example, aggressive SEO), and you have to meet on that playing field if you ever intend to be competitive. But you have to identify the limits of what's just getting into the nitty gritty of business and what's crossing the line into being a cheater/liar/phony.

There also seems to be some people for whom social camouflage comes naturally. These people don't feel like frauds or phonies when they cater their preferences and likes to match those of the group around them. It's hard to compete with these people because they have no compunction about being yes-men and they have no malfeasance behind it, since they don't really even realize they're doing -- they only realize that they're making the people around them happy. They truly just have nothing original or important to contribute and don't realize that they're mimicking everyone around them, which, as we've discussed above, is a great skill to have on the path to career success.

I think that developing an active, interesting conversational style and taking care to frame arguments in the most emotionally influential way possible without altering, distorting, or seriously misrepresenting them is perfectly in bounds. Most people do this intuitively to some extent or another, and I believe that intuition can be improved with practice and training, and that that's a great thing for anyone to develop.

The problem is that that's about where I stop. Even if there is nothing immoral about dragging yourself to a baseball game with the bosses, it still feels painful and phony to do that kind of thing. Your unscrupulous and/or unaware competitors, however, will waste no time immediately making themselves as likable as possible by adopting all of the boss's favorite things and habits, refusing to criticize him or anyone whom he holds in high esteem no matter how grossly dangerous their actions are, etc.

It's a tough game. Sometimes I try to believe that there's some cove of people that aren't this way out there, but it always gets shot down as soon as I start believing it again.

I'm starting to think that the only bonds that allow real honest participation are permanent and non-revocable bonds like parent-child and sibling relationships. People still get offended in these and rarely they may even fully withdraw, but most of the time everyone accepts each other and has to get over the perceived slights. I'm not sure there are many voluntary relationships (certainly not relationships where the continued relation is predicated upon a regular payment) where people do that.

You should be looking for another job unless you absolutely love your organization. Just look, you don't need to accept any offers.

That's good advice in general.

I know that otherwise well-reasoned emails seem like a rant once they reach a certain length. I kept the body of the email to 500 words, and included a pdf of supporting documentation. I let the email sit for a week before I sent it, and had another manager read it as well to make sure the tone was alright.

My entire argument was contained in the body of the email. I knew that was all it would take to get my boss on my side.

The PDF was aimed at HR. The IT director has a lot of power under the IT policy, and he has used it in a retaliatory manner in the past. My goal was to stop the IT director from retaliating so I could do my job while I look for a new one.

I write my emails as if they could be leaked to the general public at any time, and I'm certain that the email wouldn't reflect poorly on me, even out of context. Maybe there was a better course of action, but I don't think I did much to hurt myself.