Trust the Computer

I have been enjoying the transition from English student to full-time writer...for the most part. I had always assumed that once I started working with grownups that they would, in fact, act like grownups. Not so. People have simply stopped blaming someone for spilling punch on the carpet and moved on to shifting the blame for missing a deadline.

But I’ve also experienced a more significant bump in the road to the adult workforce. I was assigned to the workstation of an ex-employee, and the person who had my computer before me managed to leave behind some pretty malicious software hidden inside. This innocuous bit of code turned my computer into a spambot that was emailing all over the world. If you need that little blue pill to improve your “manhood” for cheap, apparently my computer’s got it.

My computer was doling out millions of emails; the IT guys here said I even got pretty good coverage of Russia. Aside from the prestige of traveling the world through email, there were two serious downsides: my computer was eating up almost the entire bandwidth of the company just with spam, and all the spamming actually got the company blacklisted on most email servers so that legitimate customer service emails weren't being sent or received.

You can imagine the management's displeasure.

You can also imagine my displeasure at having no proof that it was not some side business I was running. As expected, the IT guys are inclined to trust the computer reports more than the people. Instead of "Wow, look at what the computer did," you’re more likely to hear, "What exactly do you think you are doing to this poor, defenseless piece of company property?"

And so it was that in the first two months of my writing career I was desperately trying to keep my job, and my reputation (oh, didn't I mention that somehow all this also caused several porn URLs to appear on my reports as "sites visited"? Apparently, since I singlehandedly sent 3 million emails in a day, I must have also had time to visit Luscious Lizzy and her website of forbidden wonders.

Eventually, the IT guys were able to convince management that it was, in fact, a virus that caused all this. But not before I had used the company insurance policy to pay for 80% of a heart transplant and 50% of a blood pressure medication, with co-pay of course.