August 22, 2003

the sky is falling

this worm, this SOBIG and it's infectious friends, are just what we don't need.

i'm on the phone with a client at a big global technology company and she mentions the emails she's been sending me today, and I say, um, no, I didn't get them. Neither did I receive a critical email from one of her colleagues. Surprisingly, my bellsouth.net is hanging in there, delivering me all the spam I don't need and then some, while my clients' networks are griding to a halt, suffering email grande mals at a rate I can hardly track.

No, I'm not alone today. But I am a little scared.

I may also be one of the few who wanted to tell this client, we have two options when email dies: instant messaging and collaborative workspaces.

This is an emergency. You do what you have to do. I wanted to tell the client with whom I'm collaborating on this particular white paper project that boasts a fast approaching deadline, "Let's go start a team blog, mark it private, and do it like that. Just for today. I can't afford e-room, but blogger's free. We can make due. When we're done, we'll kill the blog. Google won't have time to spider it--and no, I'm not sure all of the technicalities on how blogger keeps private blogs private, but why worry--it's Friday and we can delete it by end of day tomorrow. We can post back and forth, leave comments, pull in links to relevant materials, and get the job done behind the backs of those motherfucking, spamloving, email-killing viruses."

That's what I didn't say.

What I did, in reality, was to send him an invitation to Yahoo Messenger hoping that he can sign on, add me as a friend, copy text out of his sent mail, paste it into an IM for me, from which I will copy it out and paste it into our MSWord document.

That will work for the edits.

But...

Let's hope everything's up and running once I plug the changes into the layout and have to turn around the 20-page MSWord file.

'Cause that's when I get to send the invoice.

i.e., that's how I eat.

Fuck you, infectors and spammers.