As the Systems Administrator for a small to medium sized business, I am in charge of maintaining a secure network infrastructure. One of my daily tasks is to check up on the latest and greatest virus/adware/trojan/badprograms/etc alerts. We have several hardware and software related items that aide in the protection of our network – Firewalls, VLANs, ACLs, Antivirus, Group Policies, etc. However, from time to time I get some of the most creative responses out of people.

I received 9 emails in a row alerting me to a virus (VNC actually) that was attempting to install on a laptop. We use VNC in-house to help with diagnosing problems from our remote location. The Antivirus doesn’t mind if it’s already installed as I have put VNC into the exceptions list, but it doesn’t like it if you’re just trying to install it from scratch. So this user attempted to install VNC 9 times. In a row. After the 9th time, they walk over to my desk and ask why it won’t install. I said they should install VNC BEFORE installing the antivirus.

“Oh, so that’s why it keeps bitching at me”