personal tech
Maybe they were looking for Private Data
ON CALL Fronting up to work on Friday morning can feel like a mistake, but The Register tries to make it worthwhile by bringing you a new installment of On Call – the reader-contributed column that shares your tech support stories.This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Lee" who told us about his time as sysadmin at the headquarters of a retail company."It was about the year 2000 and I was a newly minted Certified NetWare Engineer administering Novell servers," Lee reminisced. Before long, Lee was running the teams that managed email servers and provided desktop support for over a thousand users.
"I got to know just about everybody in the HQ and became known as the go-to guy for all things technical," he proudly told On Call.
One Friday afternoon, a vice president called to complain he couldn't access any files from his PC because someone else was using them.Lee found this a little odd, so he asked if the veep was seeing a "file in use" dialog in Word or Excel.The veep replied that he was indeed seeing an error that read "General failure is reading Drive C" – but that was obviously someone using the handle "General Failure" to mask their identity.Lee's next question was very precise."I asked if the error message read 'General failure is reading Drive C:'" he told On Call.
