[TRENCHES] Thursday, July 17, 2014 - Decent Proposal

Geth

Decent Proposal
http://trenchescomic.com/comic/post/decent-proposal

Marsh gas reflected from Venus

Anonymous

This is more a tale from the trenches of technical support.

I used to work for a big company, one of the largest providers of PC’s in my country, on their premium rate technical support line. Shortly after the company bought out an Internet Service Provider (back in the days of dialup), we started getting calls from customers that were completely unable to get access to the internet. We discovered this to be due to a virus on the computer that was blocking access, but could not find details of this virus anywhere, it seemed to be particular to our machines. We contacted the software escalation team, and were told ‘Factory restore them’. But the problem did not go away. Eventually, the problem was so rife our team got one customer to send in their computer to us.

We discovered the ‘virus’ did not block all access to the internet. If you tried through the company’s own ISP, it worked fine. We also discovered that the ‘virus’ was part of the preloaded software our company put on every machine we built and sold.

We filed a full report on the issue…and two days later our department was visited by some large employees in dark suits, who ‘politely’ informed us we had never seen or interacted with any piece of software that behaved as a virus, had never written any report on such a piece of software, and if we told any ‘lies’ about such a thing, we would be fired for gross misconduct.

A day later the company sent out a ‘BIOS patch’ to all it’s customers that erased all evidence of the ‘virus’ we had investigated.

Thankfully, that company no longer exists.

Kamar

First Trenches to get a real laugh from me in recent memory.

Chris FOM

Comic was great. Tale was horrifying.

cB557

Hrm.

Warlock82

Ok that comic was great

cB557

Meh. Tired jokes are tired imo.

Neuroskeptic

The Trenches: "Proving the naysayers wrong since 2011"

zepherin

This tales brings a lesson every person working anywhere should know. Keep a log. After that big wig meeting, the time that the event happened. Who was there and exactly who said what.

Everyone reading this should have one digital or college rule.

Gamer8585

Kissing is VERBOTEN!!!!11111 either way. Man the Trenches have started to get good again.

two days later our department was visited by some large employees in dark suits, who ‘politely’ informed us we had never seen or interacted with any piece of software that behaved as a virus

well...to be fair to Senior Manager Rocco and Administrative Atache Knuckles the program doesn't seem like a "Virus" per say. However it is a piece of malware that if discovered could get some senior exec some time talking to the CEO about why the FTC is investigating them.