Virus and the Corporate World

If you haven't already guessed, I work in a corporate atmosphere. Yeah, I know. The pictures with the cowboy hat, the comic book art, the endless talk of Legos and Star Wars probably had you fooled, but sad to say I am employed by a company that actually has a middle management level.

If you've ever worked with computers in a big corporation, you'll understand my current dilemma. A few days ago, we were infected with the Muu virus. It's not like a normal bug that is opened by some technophobe who really thinks that someone they don't know cares about them enough to send them a Friendly greeting, it actually works its way into a network and looks for any shared folders, moves to them, finds more shared folders and it's on its way. While shared folders aren't hard to find on one machine, looking for them on every machine in the company takes some time, especially if they're on machines that are rarely viewed. Automation is a nasty lady when it comes to that. You hear a lot of, "Huh, I didn't even know we HAD this machine."

So for the past 4 days, we've been through a mix of scrambling around trying to stem the flow of infectious code and sitting idly by because some of our servers just aren't working. To top it all off, today, Friday, our email server goes down and we have no way to communicate to large groups at once. For problem reporting that's a big issue, I don't even have the phone numbers to call all the people I need to tell something isn't working right. Again, nasty lady. Let's just say I've got a little time on my hands.

Well guess what, today, of all days, management decides to ask how our testing is going. I work in Quality Assurance and we run all our applications through a battery of tests before they're released. For the past week we haven't had servers and sometimes our own machines to test with, but that doesn't stop the supervisory board from asking how our testing is going. How's it going? HOW'S IT GOING?? It's going freakin nowhere, Sir! If you haven't noticed, 70% of our machines won't load a desktop, the rest are using up the CPU like a cancer. Now our Exchange server is down and you want me to give you an update on our testing?

Coupled with this is the building management's uncanny knack of not providing half our building with AC on Fridays. So with coworkers in tanks tops and I in my cap, we all settle down and put up with this crap.

(Notice this has little to do with the cool things going on in Austin, just looking for a place to open up the valves a bit.)