the amazon jungle (hint: it's dense)

today has been an accummulation of very long queues, being caught in the middle of other peoples' inefficiencies, slightly dim-witted salespersons ... and some very very dense system administrators.

dense administrators are funny if it's happening to other people, but not when it's happening to you (though they do make good party jokes.. sorry, my tech support friends! :P ).

i figured a virus/worm must have found its way into the network when i received a delivery-failure email from Yahoo about an email that was allegedly sent from my account to some fake (Yahoo) email addresses (which, on closer inspection, were manipulated versions of emails in my address book). the alleged email sent from my account had the looks of the doings of a virus/worm - the typical subject, content, etc. typical stuff. me no computer security expert, but there was some malicious program lurking somewhere which probably meant that i should drop a short note to the IT guys to let them know about it.

so i emailed IT, requesting them to look into the matter. after all, these things can obviously be potentially embarrassing .. (well, i guess it's more acute in professional firms where sometimes attachments broadcast to the rest of the world by the worm could be partial contents of a confidential document - once received one such message before containing partial contents of a court document saved in the virus victim's hard drive).

righto.

the first email that came back from IT told me that because the message was from yahoo.com, i have to contact the Yahoo administrator.

hmm. did the system administrator write that, or did he have dart-throwing monkeys in his room that day?

anyway, poor guy had obviously somehow misunderstood my email, so i mailed back with a clarification. i even offered a description of a similar situation encountered at my office. i must have written too much. the next email that came back somewhat defensively told me that oh, then it could be spam, which is beyond his control because spammers' machines don't belong to our organisation, and started giving me a lesson on how i must be careful about spam.

ow. ok. no, it's really, really, not spam i'm talking about (yes i think i am aware of what spam is). no, nobody needs to check anything with the Yahoo administrator, whoever s/he is. no, no, no. what's with the defensive front? was it an attempt to avoid work? i think i can identify with a LOT of Dilbert comics today... (e.g. "hello, this is tech support, how many I abuse you?")