In the late 90’s early ‘00’s I worked for a “start-up/spin-off” dot com company. We had been an office with a college that had been re-constituted as a for profit company to run the college’s distant learning. The company was a year and half old and had grown from the original six of us (three IT, one programmer, two designers/managers/sales people) in a trailer on campus to 75 people in three offices and a Co-Lo site. The IT staff was still three.
The new sales department was three friends of friends and based in NYC, five hours away. One, we will call M. was a “problem child”. Every computer M had became infected, corrupted, or other random problems that come from deleting your anti-virus program and visiting porn sites. [I should note that M had admin privileges over the computer at the demand of the CEO, M’s neighbor.]
After a year and three sales, the CEO left so a new CEO was appointed by the College. The first thing he did was appoint a CTO and than added new sales person.
The new sales person on his second day called our help line with a crises: “I can’t get to the web site and I have a perspective sale coming in a few minutes!” A few quick questions later the issue is resolved, being new he had miss-spelled the company name. An understandable new person mistake.
The three of us had a habit of answering by using the speaker phone so everyone in our closet could hear the question and all pitch in if needed. We all looked at each other and said “Noob”. The CTO walked in and looked confused, at that moment the help line rang. I hit speaker and it was M.
M :“I’m having the same problem as {new sales person}!”
“Oh? Your miss-spelling the company name too?”
M: “What? Uh, No, my computer is slow! It keeps opening programs like crazy. I had to power it off.”
“Programs” are what M called IE windows, Java-script pop ups.
“What web pages did you visit when this started?”
M: “Uh, I don’t remember…I’ll call when it happens again. Bye!”
My co-IT guys pulled up M’s logs. Some very interesting URL’s were visited between the log in at mid-day and the call twenty minutes later. (good thing we are not low on X’s, that list would have had most of them)
On the bright side the CTO then had us pull up the last four months of logs for M’s machine as well as all the trouble tickets we had on M. M was let go two weeks later and the number of trouble tickets in the NYC office dropped by two-thirds.