My Tom-Boy Girlfriend

#20 : Virus Attack

Sasha's POV

🎶🎶
Stranded, reaching out
I call your name but you're not around
I say your name but you're not around
🎶🎶

Humming along to the tunes in my favorite playlist, I started my day at work. The upbeat tunes kept me on a high, not that I was ever low, making me work at a faster pace, matching up to it. I was on a roll, completed throwing two defects that were assigned to me by my Quality Assurance (QA/ Testing) team, back to them. Scoffing at their working ways, everything needed to be spoonfed.

Who do they think they are messing with??
Defect! My foot!!
That's incorrect test data setup, dear...
Learn the business aspects first before throwing something at me.
All they had to do is input some test data and click two buttons to verify the output....
Even that they couldn't do properly.... Ufff!

One thing I learnt in my years spent at this office, apart from mastering programming languages; you needed to learn the art of tackling and playing tennis - to smash the ball in other's court. Every task directed to you, is not meant to be worked upon by us, most of the time it's needs to parcelled back to the sender for their proper inspection.

Letting out a snort, troublemakers are there in every team. Looking over at my colleague, who had to deliver a simple piece of code last week, I rolled my eyes. If he was just warming his seat and playing games on his phone, he would take another week for fixing the pending defect. All that required was replacing the 'OR' keyword to 'AND' in one program, and Viola!, the defect would vanish. I had even hinted him the fix along with the program name, still he thought he had time, till the world comes to an end, to complete his task.

In my hyperness, I kept marking the insignificant unread mails as read, without giving it a second look. The cursor shifted slightly and clicked on a link in the mail's preview section.
A page opened and some funny green colour screen appeared with a visitor's counter displayed, whose count was increasing within microseconds.

Oops! What did I do?

In an impulse, I closed the page, getting scared that it could be a malicious link. Next minute, the beep of a system sound came, along with it a pop-up from the anti-virus software installed in my computer, rose from it's icon in the taskbar.

Oh My God!
Don't tell me, don't tell me it's related to some malware detection.

Crossing my fingers, I looked heavenward and chanted some slogans in bullet train speed. Opening my right eye, I moved the cursor to the pop up window.

Please be an upgrade pop-up.... Please... Pretty please!

The maximized window of it, spread across my monitor. Scanning through it for some good news to detect keywords like 'Upgrade', 'Patch required', 'scheduled' but Alas! met with the dreaded information.

"One Malware detected on your system - 22/06/2019 11:00 am IST"

My fingers were trembling on the mouse and the cursor hovered over the 'Show Details' button. An internal battle started on whether or not, to the click it. Like the decision to rip off a band-aid over a wound, I took the hard call and clicked it. Boom! There, it had the recently opened link details and time. Everything proved that the mail I had received was the root cause. Being the responsible employee, I forwarded the malicious mail to the official spam helpdesk email address, for their intimation and awareness. The anti-virus software icon was rotating in the taskbar, indicating it's busy doing some background processing.