Most Back To Loving Their E-Mail County Computers Get Hammered A 2Nd Day By Virus, But Others Return To Normal

The day after the ILOVEYOU e-mail rampage, life returned to the 21st century. Most Inland Northwest office workers had no trouble sending and receiving e-mail at machines that were disabled 24 hours earlier.

But for 2,500 Spokane County government computer users, Friday was a second straight day of working in the past.

They reverted to faxes, phone calls and physically taking documents from one room to another, instead of clicking a mouse and sending data digitally.

“Everybody here is now so used to e-mail that it’s been an inconvenience not having it,” said Gary Berg, deputy county clerk.

Heavy e-mail users in the county, like Superior Court Judge Michael Donohue, found themselves suffering e-mail deprivation at work.

“It’s been an interesting experience,” Donohue said by phone Friday, “in finding out how dependent I am on e-mail.

“I’m still in awe of e-mail and how fast it lets us communicate. I miss it,” he said.

Spokane County employees were without e-mail service for a second day Friday even though computer technicians had installed virus-eradicating software on the network.

“We had the e-mail server up for about four minutes (on Friday), and we got 4,000 more messages sent to us,” said Bill Fiedler, assistant information services director for Spokane County. “So we’re having to rescan. We hope to be back up on Monday.”

Most area companies and agencies were not struggling as much as the county.

Most, like Fairchild Air Force Base, spent Thursday or part of Friday downloading software updates that prevent ILOVEYOU from damaging files or sending out multiple new messages.

The impact for this area was described as minimal, largely because most firms had advance notice as they arrived at work Thursday.

“That really gave us an advantage, being three hours earlier than the East Coast, where they already had the problem,” said Capt. Lisa Neidinger, Fairchild’s public information officer.

Most companies in the area Friday kept computer network managers busy, watching for any possible sneak attacks in the aftermath of ILOVEYOU.

Friday morning, a second version of the virus, titled JOKE.VBS, showed up at Carol Richel’s computer in Laclede, Idaho.

“We found it right away and shut the system down,” said Richel, who works for Riley Creek Lumber Co.

The virus came disguised in an e-mail from the company’s comptroller, so employees thought it was safe to open, Richel said.

Kathryn Tacke, state labor analyst in Coeur d’Alene, deleted 300 of the ILOVEYOU e-mails from her computer system.

“I thought, `Oh, please, don’t let my fingers slip,”’ she said.

A survey of area companies found only one firm, Itronix, with a portion of its e-mail network not functioning. In that case, the shutdown affected only the United Kingdom component of Itronix’s 450-user system, network director Kathleen Grieb said.

Throughout the area, company officials dealing with the virus said they lost no important information and made sure no critical business data was compromised.

“We had some problems, but we don’t really want to talk about this,” said Clara Kinner, vice president of corporate communications for Premera MSC of Washington.

“We don’t want to tell someone that they’ve disrupted us. It might give others the idea to do the same,” she said.

At the Spokane County Courthouse, Berg said the e-mail outage reminded him of what it was like in the early 1990s.

Court bailiffs, who rely on scheduling software linked to an e-mail network, struggled Friday to manage dockets the old-fashioned way - by phone call and hand-written notes.

“We’ve had to do a lot more communicating by phone than we do usually,” Berg said.

“E-mail has been adopted for so many things here because, in fact, it’s helpful and easier. And now not having it is a big inconvenience,” he said.

Staff writer Becky Kramer contributed to this report.