The Week of Hell

Last week started fine. I was working a short week, leaving on Thursday for our first vacation of the year. Because of family issues, schedules and other things, we haven’t been away all year. We were very excited to finally be going somewhere and make up for it. Then it happened.

Tuesday at lunch, I get a page from Gary saying his people got hit with a virus. By the time I returned from the cafeteria, all of our people had it. The entire group, and most everyone in the building (as big as a small city) had the Blaster32 worm. This was very bad.

For the next three days, we scrambled to update all the users in our area. This meant spending at least 30 minutes per workstation updating them to service pack 3 for Windows, then the worm patch and the removal tool. At first the process wasn’t working and it was taking way longer than needed. We came in to work early, left late and had a miserable time getting everyone up and running. I’m still wondering why a corporation of this size doesn’t have some type tool that would have pushed these updates AUTOMATICALLY to the users. We could have told the users to simply reboot their computers and sat back while the patches were applied. I just don’t get it. “All I’m asking are sharks with freakin’ laser beams attached to their heads…”

Chrysler is trying to save money by not turning on the air conditioning. It was horribly hot and muggy throughout the entire crisis and it added tension to an almost hopeless situation. What do you do when 300 people are asking you to fix their computer AT THE SAME TIME? I was hot, aggravated, tired and more stressed than I had been in a very long time. It wasn’t a good week.

On Thursday we managed to get things under control. Without the help of my tech friends, I would never have been done. I am extremely grateful for their assistance. Things were almost back to normal so I left for the day to begin my vacation at 3:45.

On the way home, I cheerfully listened to the radio trying to forget the past few days. I was so happy to finally be out of that hot, humid and aggravating place. Then the radio went out. Next I noticed the traffic lights were out. I tried to call home and the cell phone was out. Everything was out. Fortunately I was almost home. I made my way past two more intersections that were all fouled up. The idiots on the road have no idea what to do when a traffic light isn’t working. “Treat it as a four-way stop” they always tell us. I guess I was the only one that listened. It was a huge mess but I managed to get home without any problems. Pam was already there, she left work at noon.

We didn’t understand the scope of the problem until we turned on the radio. As we listened, we realized our vacation plans were slowly being cancelled. The pet sitter wasn’t able to come over, we didn’t have gas in our car and couldn’t get it anywhere and the failing sump pump was threatening to flood our new basement.

I have some blackout pictures in the Gallery.

And I was still hot and miserable and stressed out. This wasn’t a good week.