"She promptly sent out an e-mail to a member of the IT staff expressing her concerns," fish says. "Then she closed the notification window and began taking care of various tasks for the day."

Unfortunately, the IT staffer that the supervisor notifies is working the late shift and won't be in for hours. So instead of the workstation being quarantined, nothing happens while the supervisor finishes her morning's work and leaves her desk without shutting down her PC.

That means that when a different IT staffer arrives at the supervisor's office to install a software update, the PC is still running. "The techie exercised some initiative and accessed the executable file needed for the upgrade from a network share -- and unwittingly unleashed the virus onto the network," groans fish.

"To add insult to injury, the techie loaded up the now-infected program onto a testing machine in her office for further evaluation and promptly forgot about it. " For fish's part, the day is spent doing patches and software upgrades -- many of which come straight from the infected network share. That's what everyone on fish's team is doing too. And by the time the late-shift tech receives the supervisor's e-mail message about the antivirus warning, the infection is everywhere. "Appropriate action to clean the network and the infected workstations was executed, and within a few days we were confident that everything was under control," fish says.

"But Mr. Murphy had not quite left the building. For reasons that defy explanation, the test machine that I mentioned earlier was pressed into service the following week without anyone remembering that it had been infected. "Within half a day, we were right back to square one with antivirus warnings popping up all over the place. "Needless to say, at our most recent staff meeting, the topic of communication and proper procedure was a hot topic."