Your past IT performance may come back to reward you

In this IT tale, a three-week contract gig and an Autostart worm infestation lay the groundwork for a permanent position

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Near the start of my IT career, I was looking for a short-term contract position of three to four weeks to fill the gap between my previous gig and a pending relocation to another state. This was around the time when Mac OS 8 was introduced and when the Macintosh user community was well in to making the transition to the Power PC architecture. Having worked with and being quite familiar with the Macintosh operating system, I landed a contract at a media company assisting with some backed-up help desk tickets.

As is the case with many publishing enterprises, "Media Co." had a heavy Mac exposure -- several hundred Mac clients.

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During the course of the first week or so, I noticed some suspicious behavior among the higher-end systems: slowness in opening files, excessive hard drive activity, and difficulty connecting to the Macintosh servers (the Windows servers and PC clients appeared to be unaffected).

The position I'd held just prior to this contract was with a local technical support/field support company. One of the clients I had dealt with was a local newspaper, sort of a "Merchandiser" or "Shopper" type of rag, which was half Mac, half PC. I was called in because of a presumed virus infestation on the Mac side. At that time, Mac viruses were quite unusual, so we were learning on the fly. Working closely with the tech support staff for Dr. Solomon's anti-virus program, we were able to identify and isolate the worm, Autostart.b, and over the course of a few days eliminated it from the newspaper's network.

I approached Media Co.'s help desk manager with my observations and voiced my suspicions that there was a virus loose on the network. He countered with something akin to, "We're a Mac shop -- we don't get viruses."

The next day, after seeing additional evidence of what surely appeared to be some sort of spreading electronic nastiness, I approached the divisional IT director as well. His response was similar to the help desk manager's, indicating that he was not worried.