Welcome to Friday and therefore to a fresh edition of On Call, The Register’s weekly tale of tech support trials and tribulations that readers kindly share. This week, meet a reader we’ll Regomize as “Mason,” who told us he once worked at a hospital doing tech support for its research labs. “One of the labs was for a doctor who was one of the world’s top organ transplant researchers” Mason told On Call. The doctor was also a voracious consumer of – ahem – adult entertainment, a habit that saw his PC and other machines around the lab often come down with a nasty case of malware. Mason got to clean that up, sometimes multiple times in a single week. The doctor’s foibles were widely known around the hospital, as was the fact that his activities violated several workplace policies. Mason pointed this out to his boss every time he cleaned up a fresh malware outbreak but such was the doctor’s status that management never intervened. And then the hospital was hit by a nasty cyber-worm that did a lot of damage. During the cleanup, Mason’s colleagues found logs that showed the doctor’s PC was the source of the infection, and that he had been indulging in his online hobby at the time the worm arrived. Mason assumed this would be the moment at which the doctor would finally be held accountable and face disciplinary action. Instead the doctor made a bargain with the IT department to henceforth use only a designated PC when pursuing – ahem – personal and/or intimate matters. And he would only use office PCs for actual work. The hospital’s tech team rescued a PC from its e-waste pile for this job. “Get this thing going and deliver it to Doctor Pervert,” Mason’s boss ordered. By this stage, Mason had had enough. He escalated his protests, telling his boss that indulging this doctor was unprofessional, likely exposed the hospital to lawsuits, wasted IT department resources, and was just wrong. “What do you want to hear?” his boss replied. “The CIO told me do this or get another job.” After Mason prepped that PC, he only needed to clean up malware about once a year – after the poor machine was so overrun with malware that it no longer served the doctor’s purposes. Mason left the hospital while this PC was still in place. “You’ll be shocked, no doubt, to learn that years later the doctor’s graduate students filed a lawsuit,” he told On Call. “And that the separate fun-time computer was one of the pieces of evidence that the hospital knew about his – ahem – proclivities and not just ignored them but facilitated them.” Have you been asked to cover up revolting behavior? Or ignore policy? Click here to share your story with On Call. It’s our policy to tell a great tech support story week, so we appreciate every contribution. ®
Source: The Register — Security · 2026-11-06