'Virus-free' declaration

[Johnson, Tom]

But it wasn't a new floppy out of the box, it had data on it. The virus came from the engineering department, not the disk manufacturer.

Tom Johnson
Technical Writer
tjohnson at starcutter.com 

-----Original Message-----
From: techwr-l-bounces+tjohnson=starcutter.com at lists.techwr-l.com
[mailto:techwr-l-bounces+tjohnson=starcutter.com at lists.techwr-l.com]On
Behalf Of Poshedly, Ken
Sent: Tuesday, August 15, 2006 8:38 AM
To: Erika Yanovich; techwr-l at lists.techwr-l.com
Subject: RE: 'Virus-free' declaration


Sad to say, but don't even assume that new CDs (as well as floppies, et
al) are virus-free.

Back in the mid-to-late 1990s, I received, via office mail, a 3.5-inch
floppy with some data from my company's engineering department. I popped
it in the drive, copied the needed files to my hard disk, powered down
(company policy or something, I think) and then split for lunch.

Upon returning and booting up the system, it (the computer) could find
NO Drive C (that's my hard disk!). So, here I am facing a deadline, and
my system craps out BIG TIME!!

The good folks in the IT department scanned the system and found, of
course, it was a virus that jumbled my system into not being able to
recognize the hard disk (drive C). They also found the virus had come
from -- wait for it -- the floppy disk from the engineering department!
So, it took maybe another hour to undo the damage to my system (remove
the virus, locate the then-rather new software to reset the system to
recognize the unpartitioned Drive C, etc. -- lots of lost time, and _I_
looked like a careless fool to my boss (but that's another story . . .).

I phoned the young lady from the engineering dept. who sent me the
floppy and told her about the entire episode. Her response: Well, it was
a brand new floppy, right out of the box, so it's not my (her) problem.

As a matter of fact, NONE of the engineers cared one whit that they were
now using and distributing possibly virus-laden floppies to others in
the company. No, I didn't expect them to run around like wild banshees
screaming ohmygodWemustfixthisrightnow! But surely the young admin still
had that box of floppies and could have-should have either trashed the
rest of them or in her (more than enough) spare time, ran the same virus
scanning program on the other 5 or 6 floppies to keep or trash them.

To this day, I don't know which ticked me off more -- the virus-infected
floppy right from the box or the totally cavalier attitude of the entire
engineering department.


Another day, another vent.

-- Kenpo in Atlanta

P.S. -- To former co-worker Carolyn who's also on this list -- I think
you were in the office next to me at the time, and every word of this
account is true.