End of the Week Tumult

Where to start? It's been almost a week!

Last week was crazy, bizarre, and (mostly) great. All was chugging along well, I was getting to know my coworkers some more, I went to see some Irish folk music at a bar with Kim on Tuesday (the band was great, and we had a good time), I baked for the office on Wednesday (which they loved), and bought my train ticket to Berlin for Friday afternoon. I'd have to leave work an hour or two early, but they had already said this would be okay since I come in pretty early and I'm just an intern, afterall.

Then Thursday rolls around. I start the day by not being able to access the internet, which isn't a huge deal because it happens a lot and I had other stuff on my computer to work on. But then, when our tech-minded guys couldn't fix it (we don't have any in-house IT people since we're so small), we started to worry. Next thing we know, our internet provider is calling us, telling us that it detected a MAJOR virus on one of the computers and shut down our whole network. In order to fix this problem, we need to run three "deep scans" on every single machine in the office, and then they will restart our network.

Needless to say, this took several hours to achieve, especially given that we couldn't download the three programs since we don't have internet. This process involved someone going to the public library to download the programs, install them on everyone's machine, and run them all. Meanwhile, we can't do any work on our computers now, because beyond having no internet, you can't run any other programs when a scanner is running. So we hang out, eat lunch, screw around for a while, tap our fingers, etc. It's clear that everyone is getting very impatient and it was really interesting to see how everyone dealt with it.

Then the network company calls back. "Mistake - " they said, "you don't have the most current versions of the scanners. We're sending over a guy to help." By 6:45pm that evening, the process was still not complete. The (extremely Dutch) service guy they sent to help was very helpful, but you can't force a scanner to run faster than it does.

Meanwhile, the conversation had progressively gotten more and more esoteric - started with the Mouse, moved to the hobbies of the Interns (they wanted me to sing but I said no effing way) and ended off with "What is love?" People do NOT handle uselessness well; everyone is used to working so hard, that when we lose the ability to use our computers (which, face it, is like losing your right hand), no one knows how to do nothing.

Friday morning, the problems are still being fixed. Michael (service guy) is back, and within an hour of running the scanner on my machine, points to me and shouts "AHA! Is DEZE mevrouw!" which basically means "It's this woman!" Apparantly, they found something on my machine. Something huge, which of course led to joking questions of what kind of sites I was on. Michael quickly confirmed that it didn't matter what type of sites I was on (which were completely legit, I swear) but the virus could have attacked anyone and even from the most clean websites out there (which, I think the UN Framework for the Convention on Climate Change website qualifies as). There were some smaller viruses on the other intern's computer as well, and by the end of the ordeal, the consultants were assigning baking duty for the coming week.

Internet was fully restored by 3:00pm, and my train to Berlin left at four. So, after being the "cause" of two days of upheaval, I then had to cut out early, right after I regained access to work I had hoped to have done by that afternoon. I was not pleased, to say the least.

Marius said it was fine that I get him the stuff by Monday, since he didn't have a chance to do what he had wanted to, either. So I'll be in super-early tomorrow in an effort to finish my assignment before he gets there, and in additional repentance I've made chocolate chip cookies. I know it's not my fault, per se, but it was found on my machine and I'd rather be remembered as the Intern Who Baked A Lot rather than the Intern Who Took Out Our Network.

In any case, this post is long enough. I will post tomorrow, hopefully with pictures, about my trip to Berlin (which was amazing - more than made up for the trauma of the end of the week).