Security contractor blew the whistle on support crew's viral indifference

Career-limiting stupidity and rudeness exposed, with terminal consequences
This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Brad" who once worked as a security contractor.

On one job, his client downsized its office space and no longer had a desk for Brad to use.

He therefore ended up working for the client while sitting at a desk in the office of the labor hire company that arranged his contracts.

They're rude to us and do nothing.

They like to be left alone
That odd arrangement meant Brad had to be careful not to expose client data to the labor hire company, but careful use of external storage sorted that out.

And then one day the antivirus system on Brad's PC popped up with a warning and a cute animation of a wriggling bug.

He quickly clicked on the Quarantine button, yanked out the network cable, shut down his machine, and called the helpdesk without much enthusiasm because he'd seen them in action.

"You know the type," he told The Register .

"Users couldn't possibly know the local magic spell, so instead of telling you they enter it on your keyboard, hunching over so you can't see the keypresses.

Next time you need it, they are nowhere to be found."
Nobody answered the phone so Brad approached one of the labor hire company's middle managers for help, and asked if he had ever seen antivirus alerts.

"Oh, yes, they appear quite often," came the reply.

Brad asked if the company had a procedure for responding to the alerts.

"Mostly we just close them and carry on," the manager said.

Brad was now quite curious and asked if the IT team ever did anything about the obviously rampant viruses coursing through the company.

"No, they're just rude to us and do nothing.

They like to be left alone," the manager explained, before revealing that the two-person support team had gone on holiday, at the same time and together, and wouldn't be back for a fortnight!

Thankfully, the labor hire company had another office with competent IT staff.

"They expressed a certain surprise at my story, but soon had my PC cleaned out and safely restored," Brad wrote.

He then immediately disconnected it from the network.

"For the next week or so, things ran unusually smoothly for the whole office," Brad told The Register .

"And when the support team returned from their holidays, they found they had no jobs to return to."
Brad didn't tell us if his incident was the reason for the pair's dismissal, but the timing looked like more than a coincidence!

Have you ever stumbled across an IT problem everyone else had learned to ignore?

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