Herman by Jim Unger for September 22, 2024

That’s How The Greeks Got Into Troy, Ya Know

I’m an IT technician. So is my colleague, but he is… well… a bit special. One day, a customer sends an email, which [Colleague] reads but doesn’t tell me about. I haven’t seen it because I only look at the mailbox when I see there’re unread messages. Our boss has also seen it but not opened it, so he comes over, his wife with him, and asks us about it.

Boss: “What about that email from [Customer]?”

Colleague: “I’ve seen it.”

Boss: “Did you check it out?”

I now look at the email. It is a forwarded email that the customer received supposedly from a delivery service with a PDF attached, supposedly an invoice. The customer asks us to open the file in an isolated environment to check if it’s legit, or possibly infected.

Colleague: “Okay, they sent us a file. Let’s look inside.”

Boss, Boss’s Wife, & Me: “NO!“

He had almost opened a potentially malware-infected file, on his work PC, because he didn’t think. As an IT technician. Luckily, he didn’t, and I checked the file on a sandbox I have set up specifically for that purpose (it looked legit), but my boss really ripped into him.

(not MY story)

They still end up in the dump file, just sooner

When everything is the top priority – nothing is.

YOUR high priority is rarely MY high priority.

True dat.

Usually, it’s scams posing as real concerns for you. Pro tip – When someone says to go out and but gift cards, and then provide the numbers to the person to make the problem go away, you may be dealing with a scam artist.

When I build my resume, I use caps and bold and underline sparingly. Over use like ALL CAPS on a post obscures what is important.

Delete everything in your inbox at the end of the day. If it’s important, they’ll resend it.

That will work for about 24 hours, after which they’ll start ignoring all of your emails.

Nobody sorts on “priority” anymore for just that reason. There is no “feature” that cannot be subverted into uselessness.

That will be a priority deletion.

Neither is “Super Duper Important”

“FAILURE TO PLAN ON YOUR PART DOES NOT CONSTITUTE AN EMERGENCY ON MY PART”

You know you’re living too fast when a microwave isn’t fast enough.