The office was, in fact, big enough that it had its own lawyer. Lawyers, in government work, do not make as much as lawyers in private practice. However, they make up the difference in arrogance. Government lawyers are more important than you are, whoever you are. I was summoned to the lawyers office to help out with a problem. When you are summoned by the government lawyer you go to the government lawyer's office, and you wait. Even the lawyer's secretary, a lawyer being one of the only positions that actually rates a secretary, is arrogant. So, having arrived in their office, I waited until she deemed to announce me, and the lawyer allowed that I could come in. He told me why I was there. His computer was infected with a virus. The it had been infected before, and the IT staff had cleaned up the virus for him. But the virus had come back, so obviously they had done something wrong the first time.
Well, of course, I knew what had happened. They had cleaned up the computer, but they hadn't cleaned up all of his floppy disks. So I said this. He was giving me his computer, but I also asked for all the floppy disks that he had. He asked why. I said that obviously the virus that had infected his computer, had transferred onto the floppy drives that he used, and so I needed all of his discs so that I could check them. He looked at me, obviously doubting my story, and obviously feeling that I was lying to him, but willing to go along with this just so that he could rake me over the coals when I was later proved wrong. He opened various drawers and pulled out about forty different discs. I took the computer and the discs back down to my office.
Cleaning up his computer was actually a fairly difficult task. It was an interesting laptop, a dual floppy situation, with a hard drive, but with an absolute insistence on running constantly, and not allowing you to do a normal rebooting process. I actually had to take the computer apart and take the battery out of it before I could get it to reboot.
Once I had the computer cleaned up, I turned to the floppy disks. They were an absolute disaster. Thirteen of them were so corrupted that they were completely unreadable. About fifteen of the discs I was able to clean up and ensure that no infection was present. About fourteen of the floppy disks had serious infections on them, and it was difficult enough that I felt it best not to try to disinfect those particular discs, but to simply retain them.
So, it was back to the lawyer's office. Again waiting for the snooty secretary, and then finally getting in to see the lawyer. I gave him back his laptop and told him that it was cleaned. I gave him back the fourteen discs that were safe and said that these discs were clean I told him that thirteen of the discs were completely unreadable and therefore I had kept them, and that fifteen of the discs were infected badly enough that I felt that it was unsafe for him to use them, and noted that if there was anything particularly important on those particular discs he should let me know and I could try and see if I could recover that material.
This is one of only two times that I can recall actually seeing somebody's jaw drop open in shock. He had obviously thought that I was lying to him before, and was pulling some kind of a scam on him, and that I would come back with some on story about the difficulty of cleaning up his computer. He didn't expect me to have identified the fact that he had a real mess on his hands. He sat there for a while just trying to take this in and then suddenly was galvanized into action. He jumped up and started pulling open all kinds of drawers and cupboards in the office hauling out about another forty floppy disks. I took them and went back down to my office and got about the same result, roughly a third unreadable, roughly a third too badly infected to safely disinfect and give back to him, and roughly a third that I could safely return to him.
There was a bit of a follow-up to this story. A few days later I heard a noise and turned around and here was the lawyer standing outside of my cubicle. He had a cardboard box in his hands. These he said were discs floppy disks from his home, and would I take a look at them. Certainly, I could, and I did. There were about a hundred discs all together in the box that he had given me, and, once again, I had about the same result. I took him back up the safe discs later that afternoon.
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