This week I've had to reinstall software on all of our engineering machines. I'm not done yet but I'm about half way through now. It's a tedious process and most of my time is spent uninstalling the software I'm replacing. I've written routines to help with the install but not the uninstall, yet.
For the computers here in the states I wait until after hours, when I'm at home, to work on this. That way I don't interfere with anybodies work during the day. Sometimes it only takes me twenty minutes on a machine but on others it takes an hour. So, to avoid being blamed for lack of productivity, I make the sacrifice and do it after hours.
For our overseas offices and some of our shops (they leave at 3:30 or so) I can work on their machines during my regular work day. Today I was working on some machines in our Singapore office. I can work on three or four machines at once which helps speed things up. I was finishing up on one machine this morning when somebody closed down the program I was trying to configure. I asked my fellow IT team if any of them were working on the same computer and they said they weren't on any of the Singapore machines. So I went back to the computer and watch somebody open the web browser. Nothing came up because of how I was logged into that machine. So they closed that and started playing pinball. I tried to open up notepad to try and communicate with whoever was in the Singapore office at 2:30 in the morning but they kept moving the mouse and preventing me from doing anything. So, using keyboard shortcuts, I closed their game and locked Windows. Since they don't have my password they were unable to log into the computer. After a couple of minutes I unlocked it and kept working. No further problems on that computer or any of the other computers.
I'm figuring it was a janitor who was taking a break. If it was someone from the office they probably would have logged me out (which I gave them time to do so I could figure out who was on the machine) and the probably would have got off of the computer when they noticed that someone else also had control of it. It's not uncommon for them to call us with a problem and we'll take over their machine to resolve it. This person continued to try and play games. When I closed down pinball, they opened up minesweeper. When I tried to go through the dialog boxes to lock Windows, they canceled it before I could lock it. Thank goodness for keyboard shortcuts.
I also wonder if this person commonly sits down at one of our machines and tries to play games. If they're not one of our employees they wouldn't be able to get on a machine. Were they just walking by and noticed that one of the machines was logged on and took advantage of the situation? And then fought hard for that one game of solitaire? Maybe they just wanted five minutes to relax and play a mindless game of pinball and I blew it for them. Hopefully they aren't mad at me and take it out on the office. I wouldn't want our guys to show up Monday morning to an office with all the garbage dumped out on the floor and the refrigerator/freezer left open so that it defrosted over the weekend. I guess we'll just have to wait and see.
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