Special Report – A Day at a Tech Job

Following the sequence

The first round-trip took about an hour and a half in total, as in-between installations the employer – who has an actual interest in how a computer really works and what can go wrong with it – had a few questions about how the AV and AS protection programs would really work, and why four programs were needed instead of one. By now you might be wondering why I said “round-trip”, exactly. The thing is, as you probably know if you ever did an AS/AV scan, it takes a while. It takes an even longer while on company computers as AV scans always check Word and Excel files, and you can probably guess how many there would be on an average SoHo that has been working for over ten years.

A lot of the alloted time, while it definitely does count as your payment hour as you have to monitor the machines, is just idling – in my case, I literally spent dozens of minutes walking from one room to another monitoring the scan progress and re-evaluating how long it’d take for the whole job to be finished. At this point, it’s worth noting that pulling a Scotty – that is, overestimating how long a task will take by a large margin, for those of you who haven’t watched Star Trek – is generally a very good idea, as you give yourself breathing space and the employer gets more than a pleasant surprise if the task gets done before deadline. It’s not your fault the computers are slow, so you have absolutely nothing to fret over. If you’ve got enough time to take walks between tasks, consider it a bit of exercise, something most non-techies would say we need more than anything else.

The second round-trip meant starting spyware scans on all seven machines, first through Spybot, then through AdAware, in order to avoid spyware snaking its way through the net. SpywareBlaster had already been started on all machines to prevent at least half the future incursions. Scans tended to finish in the same order as they were started, which wasn’t surprising considering they were pretty much equally power, with the oddball database server which was somewhat slower, yet still good enough to go through the scan without much hassle. If you’re ever in a situation to scan SoHo computers, you can pretty much expect the same spyware as with home computers – tracking cookies are the most common, with a couple of toolbar- or software-related bits and pieces that just cling to Internet Explorer and won’t uninstall. Using both pieces of software, along with the Task Manager, I checked for any remaining traces of spyware – thankfully, there were none, which meant the third round-trip was just around the corner.

The third run undoubtedly took the largest toll on the computers and the longest amount of time, as that was when the virus scan was started. Although some might argue that running an AV scan as the last point isn’t as effective, the machines had to be restarted post-scan anyway, in order for the AV to snatch any startup items that were infected. All but one of the computers were infected, mostly by one-time trojans and worms that the expired Avast just couldn’t lock down – and to my great surprise, the laptop was the cleanest one; whether it’s due to Norton AV or due to the user’s work ethics, we’ll never know. Either way, some computers finished their scan right on schedule, while two had to be postponed for next Monday – the slow and steady database server and the gateway, which could scan itself, but couldn’t monitor network traffic without a corporate license. One was rescheduled for a boot-up scan, while the other was set up for a night-time scan so as not to slow down network and outbound traffic.

Final survey

The final check was done three days later. The AS scan neutralized all of the spyware on all computers, the AV scan eliminated sleeping worms and happily shredded those that tried to activate upon booting, and in the end, all of the computers checked out as clean. Luckily enough for both the employer and myself, no data was ever lost on any of the disks – a company would probably grind to a halt were any documents lost.

After a short chat and verbal report on the cleanup, my paycheck was determined, agreed upon and promptly paid. All in all, not something you would call a particularly demanding task; even though eight hours of installing, scanning, cleaning and walking still are eight hours – a handsome payment, the satisfaction of a job well done and the promise of more jobs more than covered it. After all, doing a good job is important, and so is the payment – but for a freelancing techie, making sure you have a future customer for time to come is what counts the most.

 
Written by Boris M