Jack ‘n Tracie

I’m thankful I haven’t upgraded my OS to Win2000… Not that I would open any strange emails or whatever anyway but I’m just glad that having my old OS has protected me from that last couple nasty worms that are shutting down systems everywhere.

But I’m still pissed. I bet these virus authors don’t realize (or maybe they do and don’t care) that they literally are messing with people’s lives and putting lives at stake with the little virus they create. I’m sure most people don’t think about this… but what do you think happens when a major hospital gets infected with these viruses? Total mayhem… and this mayhem affects our health care.

Jack and his co-workers have been working overtime for the past two days trying to protect and disinfect the network system at the local hospital here in our city. This hospital spends millions to keep viruses out of their system and it does a good job. But one mistake (and a loophole they didn’t think about) from one vital person caused them to be hammered with the virus. Their network is currently locked down.

So lets say you have a disease and you pass out. You’re taken via an ambulance to the emergency room. Normally they would pull up your file and all the information they need about your disease and the treatment for it would be at the health care worker’s fingertips. Well not today. Since the network had to be shut down, they have to go find your file and pull all the paperwork from it. This takes precious time that you may not have! If you’ve had x-rays or bloodwork done, it has to be found and located the old-fashioned way.

Jack worked next to a doctor who had a Kaiser patient who was very sick. Since our local hospital is NOT a Kaiser hospital, normally he’d dial into Kaiser’s computers and look up his patient’s information. Well he couldn’t do that. He had to call Kaiser and they had to locate it and give this patient’s info to the doctor over the phone where the doctor had to scribble it down on paper. Jack said it took 45 minutes to get all the information he needed about this patient and to try to diagnose what the problem was based on the information he was receiving over the phone. Normally he would’ve been able to look this up on his computer and cross-reference everything to figure it out. Meanwhile this patient is very sick, is suffering, and could be dying and they can’t do anything till help him in a timely and efficient manner.

It just makes me sick that people think it’s funny … or whatever … to write these viruses. It just isn’t funny to endanger people’s lives.