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At 5:20 I was just about to grab my bag and go, but was stopped by one of the production guys across the hall complaining of trouble with their GP computer. As I was asking him for details, the guy in the production room next door also complained about the machine in his room… with the same symptoms.

Oh, joy.

At first it looked like a server problem, only those two computers were the only ones experiencing problems. (One of the machines was causing a problem on the server, but once I figured that out I was able to remedy it fairly quickly… albeit not without some frustration.) Full comprehension of the problem came when I realized that those two specific machines are identical vintage-and-model IBM desktop computers, the only two of their kind in the building. Coincidence? I think not!

Now, here’s how this is all my fault in the first place. I rebuilt my software update server a while back, and since the new version of Microsoft’s product allowed me to add “device drivers” to the list of things I could offer, I went ahead and told it to grab available drivers and install them for machines that have the Intel graphics chipsets.

I’ll bet you can already guess which are the only two computers in the building that have Intel 865G video hardware, huh?

Repairing the damage involved hooking up my handy-dandy USB “swiss-army-drive” (loaded with Intel’s motherboard and networking drivers) to both computers, reinstalling both drivers on both machines, and rebooting copiously. Oh, and I told my updater server to never again fiddle with device drivers…

Now I just need to wait for the 7:08pm bus so I can go home at last. Whee!

Since I needed to remain on-site Monday evening to gracefully power off the traffic server while the electricians rerouted power around the building, I took the opportunity to upgrade Tapscan to the newly-released version 9.3. This is the first release we’ve seen in a year and a half, and remembering previous upgrade experiences led me to worry quite a bit about how it would go over, and what would be broken.

Other than one case, in which the computer wouldn’t launch the installer until a zombie Firefox process was killed, I’ve heard no complaints at all from the sales floor. Not one. At all.

I’m enough of a paranoid cynic to be waiting for the other shoe to drop; I’m also enough of a pragmatist to count my blessings and take advantage of the lack of furor to get other work done.

(Oh, and remember the design flaw thing? That hasn’t changed. Anyone can delete anyone else’s account without even trying. A year and a half goes by since the last release and that still hasn’t been fixed. Color me underwhelmed, Arbitron Software People. Argh.)

The straw that broke the camel’s back this afternoon was a salesperson who came to me inquiring as to whether I’d removed the suspicious software off of the laptop she’d been using a couple of weeks ago and had me do some work on before a major presentation to a major (and difficult) client. I noticed a couple of strange processes launching upon boot, and hadn’t had the time to fully investigate before she absconded with the machine. I extracted a promise from her that the laptop would be returned to me right after her presentation so I could finish dealing with… whatever that odd process might have turned out to be.

“Did you get that virus off of the laptop?”

I stared at her blankly for a full fifteen seconds, then said, “You never brought it back. I don’t know where it is. I never know where those damned things are.”

“Oh, I told [Immediate Supervisor] that you needed it. Do you mean he didn’t bring it to you?”

At that point I just laid my head down on my arm and pounded on the desk with the other in sheer frustration. Shortly afterward I left the building for the day, before I could get up the nerve to really throttle somebody.

Two weeks, and that laptop’s been running around, changing hands, being plugged into gods-know-what, and nobody gives a rat’s ass that there might be a major security problem in the making because of it. Nevermind that I’m the SysAdmin and would, in a normal office environment, be responsible for tracking and checking such equipment. Oh, no, I don’t even know how many laptops there are. I am not making this up.

Let me pose this question: Is it normal for people to promise to do something, then foist that task off on someone else without either telling the original promisee about it, or clearly stressing the importance of the task to the foistee? And if so, what penalty can I reasonably extract from these people, since I”m sure that my initial impulse of taking a clue-by-four to the offenders wouldn’t go over very well with the powers that be…?