The life of a contract killer is hard. The life of a contract network admin is possibly harder. Guillermo juggled a set of contracts with local businesses that needed help but couldn't afford a full time network administrator. This meant he was not merely a network admin, he was six network admins, often with overlapping hours.

One afternoon, he did a routine series of checks on his largest client's Exchange server. Everything looked to be in order, but this company had a huge quantity of mail going in both directions. The virus scanner on the server had archived nearly ten thousand suspicious files, named "creative" things like hotxxx.jpg.exe. The disk was getting a little fuller than Guillermo liked, so he navigated to the quarantine folder and tapped "CTRL+A".

As his hand swung across the keyboard towards the delete key, the "big boss" walked into his cube. A bottle-tanned hand slammed down on Guillermo's shoulder and the boss said, "How's every going, Gilly?"

The surprise of the moment caused Guillermo to twitch and hit the Enter key.

Not a great deal of mail went through the Exchange server that day. Guillermo learned several lessons that day. First, their virus scanner worked surprisingly well against an assault of 10,000 viruses. Second, if you're performing a routine task that you don't want to screw up, write a script for it.

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