I Died That Day

by William Jackson on 2005-09-12

Today as I was working at the Help Desk I put an infected computer onthe network.

Thatʼs bad.

It was my job to sponge the thing of all spyware and viruses, and Ithought I did, but something slipped past me. I left a little virus onthe machine. It wasnʼt even particularly nasty; I just forget to run oneof our removal tools.

I plugged the network cable into the computer, and almost immediatelythe normal lights went out and red lights started flashing everywhere,and there were sirens and klaxons and high-pitched whine sounds, as ifCapt. Picard had just yelled, “Battle stations!” Then the full-time guystarted barking out, “Pull the ethernet cables! Pull them all!” Everyoneelse in the room started yanking network cables out of the backs oflaptops all at once, and I disconnected mine, too. The full-time guyapproached the wall and punched a code into a keypad, and the sirensshut off and the lights returned to normal.

Okay, not really.

I plugged the network cable into the computer, updated Windows and allthe antispyware and antivirus software, shut down the computer, markedthe machine as “done” in the database, and put it on the “Done” shelf.Twenty minutes later a man I had never seen before walked into the roomwith a piece of paper in his hand, announced that there was an infectedcomputer on the network, and gave us the MAC address for the machine.(Ask me later what a MAC address is.) We checked the computers that werecurrently on the network, but none of them matched the MAC address. Ichecked the last machine I had worked on, and the address matched. Iowned up that it was all my fault, and everyone was nice and forgiving,and “everyone makes mistakes,” etc. But I died.

I felt bad. But now Iʼm better, because Family Home Evening is going tobe at my house tonight! Gonna have a good time tonight! Gonna have agood time tonight!