Wed afternoon I’m sitting at my desk innocently working away as a productive member of the CHD team when our IT specialist comes to me and asks “have you been sending email?” my response was “no, not recently” wondering if they have the ability to read my emails (and praying that they don’t!). Our IT person responded “well, no one in the hospital is able to send emails right now and the hospital’s IT staff think you might be causing it.”
WHAT!?!?!
She says “how do I explain this?”. I say “I’m pretty computer literate, try me”.
“there is an open portal somewhere in the hospital’s network that is exposing the entire network making it vulnerable to any viruses, the network in response has put up firewalls which is preventing everyone in the hospital from using email or the internet. The IT staff in the hospital have been tracing this portal for quite some time now, and they have traced it to someone in this department and then they specifically traced it to your IP address”.
Now, I’m not the most technical person, I’m computer literate, but not technical, so I don’t even know if that makes sense so please refrain from any “that doesn’t make sense” comments.
But I did get the point and I asked our IT person point blank “so you’re telling me that right now I am single handily disrupting the entire Aga Khan Hospital network and that no one can send email or anything because of my laptop?”
“Yes”
Well…Mission Accomplished.
Ok, so I’m not an undercover hacker, and I didn’t come here to destroy the fibre optic network, or the Aga Khan Hospital. But c’mon…how often do I get to do that?? Especially without even knowing it?!
Anyways, my instructions were to disconnect from the network, do a complete sweep of my laptop (which was clean) and then let the IT people work on..well..whatever it is they do to keep the network running. A few jokes and comments about making my laptop “Kenyan compliant”…(whatever that means) later, and I’m good to go and that portal, or whatever it was is gone.
Maybe it’s the all white casing, maybe it’s the apple logo, but I guess something about my laptop raises suspicion. But the irony here, is that although I have a mac, I’m using the Windows OS – well I’m forced to since for some reason when I load Mac’s leopard OS I can’t connect to the network (any mac users out there who know why this is happening…help!!). so its really just the casing and the apple logo..the rest is all the same. Anyways, i hope i didn't raise any suspicion, we don't have our work permits yet, so my legal status in this country is questionable right now, and the last thing i need is accusations of espionage. I'm happy to report that i'm working off a new IP address so ha! just try and find me now!
Oh and today as I arrived to work, I came to find that again, our entire hospital network was not working – it’s a regular occurrence here and can happen anytime and our IT person assured me that it had nothing to do with me. I would think not considering my laptop was still in my backpack…but I don’t have to tell you who everyone’s fingers were pointing to…
Shoulda just stayed in bed…
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5 comments:
See how much fun you're having with your Mac...and you wanted to get the Dell! :).
Hahahaha. That's a funny story. Way to bring down the hospital. I bet productivity went up that day though. Most studies that have looked into email usage have found that the majority of it isn't work related or something that just is wasting time. So think of it this way, you were actually making the hospital MORE efficient! Way to go Nik!
hahahaha
that is all.
Khalfan
And here I thought only SIMS was the source of code greys.
ROFLMAO!!!
oh sims would love you here...
love it...
miss ya, Dude!
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