Viruses and spyware and rootkits – Oh my!

This just happened…

A coworker – let’s call her Rachel -  brings in her desktop from home so I can take a look at it.  Apparently, it has been running slower and slower over the past few months.  I reluctantly agree, and she brings me  the computer equivalent of a Ford Edsel.  It takes half an hour just to boot up, and the whole time, the hard drive is grinding like a garbage disposal with a fork in it.

Once Windows finally opens, I find what appears to be her own personal museum of malware history, complete with rootkits, viruses, and what must be the world’s last surviving copy of BonziBUDDY.

I spend an hour just trying to run a rescue disk.  It crashes,  it refuses to recognize the CD drive, it belches smoke and flames.  Finally, I tell Rachel there’s nothing I can do. She says, “That’s fine.  I know it’s old. You can throw it out, just make sure nobody can steal my credit card info.”

I can’t run a boot CD to wipe the hard drive, so I decide to just take the hard drive out and break the platter with a hammer.  But someone has “borrowed” my toolkit without asking.  I don’t have a screw driver, but maybe I can still get the hard drive out.

My boss comes into my cubicle just as I start banging at the hard drive with a broom. “What the hell are you doing?”

“Oh, just fixing Rachel’s computer…”

And now her printer isn’t working, so I’m hoping I get to break that, too.

Filed under: humor by Writepop