Diary of a Network Geek

A guy tried to sell me his wife’s cousin today.
At least, that’s how it felt. He was thanking me for working on his laptop, which is personal, but used for company business. I have to admit, it was a real bear considering all the spyware and junk on it. So, he said that the next time he’s in Brazil, where his young wife is from, he’d get me something and bring it back. Then, we got talking about a project I’m working on and he starts showing me pictures. Of course, all his pictures are mixed in together, so we see a bunch of family shots and he comes across a bunch of pictures from the beach. He laughs and says he could bring me back one of “those nice, little Brazilian girls, but my wife and yours would probably be unhappy.” I laugh and tell him that I’m divorced, so it’s all good. That’s when it happened. He pulls up this pic of a girl in a bikini and tells me she’s his wife’s cousin, or something, and she’d love to meet an American man.
“She’s even nineteen already, so it’d be no problem.” Right. Sure. I’m thirty-seven and he’s going to convince a ninteen-year-old who, at best, speaks English as a second language, to move North and marry me. Yeah, that’d be great for everyone involved. I mean, look, she was pretty and I’m all for people emigrating to this country and getting citizenship and all, but, uh, not that way and not with me that way.
That happened before 9:00am, and the day just got stranger from there…

Better late than never!
Okay, well, hopefully, you didn’t have any major IT problems with your company this holiday season, but you might next year. Think about it. The holidays are a great time to attack an IT department. For one thing, so many people take extra time off around the holidays that everyone’s working a skeleton crew. For another, even those of us at work are slacking pretty badly. Add in office parties to that and, well, you get some good opportunities to make a run at an unsuspecting victim.
Thankfully, the good folks at Techrepublic have prepared a little article about dealing with holiday disasters. It’s a good read and, hopefully, will alert you to some issues that might come up during the holiday season. Share it with your Helpdesk/Network Engineers/Whoever, if you can get them to focus long enough.