The Adventures of Working From Home Safely Due to the Covid Pandemic

Like a lot of people, on March 11, 2020, I was told to take all my computer equipment home with me and set it up there to work from home for at least the next month. In fact it wasn’t just me, but the entire company was going to be working from home. I should say right here that I am a part time computer support specialist for an manufacturer in Denver, NC and a computer consultant that works from home to provide computer services and business solutions remotely (virtually) to my clients.

This series of blog posts is going to be about my experiences both as an employee sent home and as a home based consultant.

In later installments, I am going to talk about how to protect yourself, your business, and your company’s businesses data, their computers and internet security.

I have been providing computer solutions for 25 years. I am not bragging about my experience. I have probably made more mistakes (and learned from them) that most people. Every new job, whether it was as an employee or as a consultant, has made me grow immensely. Both as a technician and as a person.

Depending on which hat I was wearing at which company, I always tried my best to provide the ultimate satisfaction to those that I was helping. I learned from some great managers during my years. From John at my first NYC job to Nick at the Data Center on Long Island.

So now that we are working from home, it is a whole new scenario. Not because you are working from your home, heck most of us have worked from home from time to time. It is because keeping you, your computer and your data safe is now outside of the safety of your business network.

Hundreds of thousands of men and women found out one day that they were to take their computers home and start working from home. A good percentage of them had no idea what was to come. Taking apart their work computers and putting them in a box and bringing them into their homes was the easy part.

The problems started when they had to figure out where they were going to set them up in their house until the restrictions were lifted. Little did any of us know that it would be over 6 months (and counting) that we would be working from home.

Those first few days setting up your new home office were tedious for a lot of us. You had to find a large flat surface close to a power source … the kitchen table, maybe? After all this wasn’t going to be a long drawn out stay at home till 2021 thing, right?

We needed to also find the internet and how do you connect the business computer to it? My desktop isn’t wireless! Is it? I plugged it into the network port on the wall. And boy is the internet slow when you finally did connect to it!

You were so used to coming into work, sitting down, turning on your computer and going to get a cup of coffee. After a brief talk with other employees, you returned to your computer you have taken for granted since you started. If there as a problem, you called the help desk (me). And they accessed your computer remotely and resolved the problem and you were back to work.

Now at home, you are tasked with setting up the computer, plugging in all those wires, kicking yourself for not having taken them all! and wondering what the phone number is for the help desk.

The week we were sent home, I put in almost 60 hours helping everyone that could contact me, get their home computers setup, by talking them through which plug went where and how to connect to their home wireless routers. Which of course were the home versions and you would be sharing the bandwidth with not only your household, but if you were on cable, you would be sharing that bandwidth with the neighborhood and all the other men & women who were now working from home. Add to that the millions of kids that were either playing games, streaming video and music, surfing the web and of course connecting to their school’s remote learning site!

It, was, indeed, a long week!

More to follow.

Please leave your questions or experiences here. Through our mutual stories we learn and grow!

Rich Schierer

I have been BREACHED!!!

Today’s Virtual Tasks: I worked with a business owner who was getting too much SPAM in his Outlook Inbox. “Where did all these come from?” He asked me. Truth is, that every time you go to a website and ‘register’ with your name and email address, they immediately turn around and sell it. Who buys it is a whole other story. Another way is that those same sites where you registered were breached and all or most of their customer data was downloaded and, again, sold off. And for the most part most of us just keep ‘registering’ and are none the wiser. Well it is time to open your eyes, or pull the big green curtain aside! FireFox has a website, where you enter an email address and click the Enter key and it will check your email address against all the data breaches ever recorded. And you will be surprised at what the results are! Try every email address you have ever had. Even those Hotmail, Yahoo or gmail accounts. Check it out: https://monitor.firefox.com/The first best piece of advice I can give you here, is to change your passwords on every email account, login account, and website that you can remember. There are tons of advice on how to compose a new password. One of the best pieces of advice I ever got on the subject was to change them every 30 days. Sounds drastic, but remember we are talking about your identity here.

Have a great day everyone!

And in the blink of an eye …

The year 2020 had so much promise when it first began! And then one event, one tragedy, one movement; one after the other changed the landscapes of our lives. No more are we looking to grow. No more are we looking excel. Now we struggle every day to adapt, to juggle, to understand. And for the most part, we are only partial successful.

From Australia burning, Prince Harry & Meghan quitting the royal family, the unleashing of the COVID-19 pandemic, the tragic loss of Kobe and his daughter Giana, the Impeachment of President Trump, the ups and downs of the stock market, the BLM movement, a presidential election, hackings, Epstein, Kim Jong Un, George Floyd, Harvey Weinstein, Biden, murder hornets, Kamala Harris, riots in the streets, defunding the police, unemployment, civil war era monuments, Russia, China, Israel, Iran, whites, blacks, browns, men, women, and the list goes on. All topics that have been reported on by the media and spun to divide us. Divide us by race, religion, nationality, where we were born, where we live, how we live, who we help or don’t. Portland, OR is burning down! What city will it be next week?

How are we supposed to grow? to teach our children what is right, wrong and moral? Especially when the education system is allowed to change the rules and history to suit their objectives? How are we to prosper? When our elected officials are lying to our faces! Spending our money wastefully right in front of our faces?! Giving themselves midnight vote raises in pay?! Allowing riots in our streets and not prosecuting the law breakers!?

How do we survive?! IMHO, we do what our parents and grandparents did before us! We adapt. We overcome. We lower our heads like a massive bull who is about to charge the man holding the red cape, and we take one step, then another, and another. Until the bull sees and knows it target and accomplishes his task of ‘hitting’ the red cape. His goal at that moment has been accomplished. He now turns and decides on his next move, as we must do. What is our next move? Which way do we turn? Who do we turn to for help? Do we go about it by ourselves? Or do we gather forces? Do we close our businesses? Declare bankruptcy? Look for help from the government? From our families? Or do we change our business models? Our visions? Our goals?

This business owner, father, son, brother, husband, has decided that I will change, but only slightly, the model of my business. I think that COVID-19 has made everyone stop and think about their next steps. On how they view being a business owner, a parent, a spouse going forward. I have a choice. I will do what I must to survive and to protect my family. To help as many people along the way as I can. I will not waste my time on anything that deters me from succeeding!

Some know me and my business Prime Technical LLC as a provider of computer services and business solutions. Due to COVID-19, I no longer visit my clients business or homes to do the work. Instead, I have changed my business model to provide my services all via a virtual model. Meaning, I will help you via phone, email, and remote access. 90% of my business before the pandemic was provided just this way. And so it will continue. I have added new services to help all the new work from home employees, entrepreneurs, and business owners. Services that had once been known as being done by a Virtual Assistant. My goal is to help you find your direction and to suceed. Together we will do just that!

RANSOMWARE! Four easy steps to protect yourself!

Ransomware and the hackers that create and spread it will not be stopping anytime soon. In addition to the ransoms that these hackers demand, the downtime to a business or agency is also costly. Once your business data files have been encrypted, your business comes to a halt! Or at least any part there of that relies on the use of computers and those data files. Imagine No Quickbooks!? Or all of your databases gone? Or all of your WORD or EXCEL spreadsheets missing?!

And sadly it is all our fault! For it is us, the users of the computers that house all this information that are infecting our computers! It is us who click on that picture or link to it; it is us that opens the email and then clicks on the attachment! It is us that uses FREE antivirus applications. Remember, you get what you pay for!

So without much ado, here are the four things you can do to help prevent getting a RANSOMWARE encryption virus or any virus that slows your computer down:
1. BUY a best of breed antivirus application such as PC PITSTOP or MALWAREBYTES PRO.
2. BACKUP OFFSITE all of your personal and business data using Carbonite or one of the others.
3. MAKE sure your Windows based computers operating system is up to date on it patches and updates.
4. DON’T open email attachments from anyone! Especially with a suspicious subject line.

There are lots more ways of protecting your computers, like never going onto porn sites or changing your passwords every 60 days and using STRONG passwords. And remember it is US that let’s our guard down and not have a tuned up computer and utilizing security products correctly!

See you on the grid!
Rich