THE FOLLOWING IS MEANT ONLY FOR HUMOR PURPOSES. IT WAS WRITTEN AS A GAG FOR A FRIEND WHO DIDN'T WANT TO DO HIS ASSIGNMENT. THE HUMOR IS VERY DARK/BLACK SO IF YOU DON'T LIKE THAT, TURN BACK NOW. THIS IS NOT BASED ON REAL EVENTS, ONLY STEREOTYPES OF I.T. IN THE REAL WORLD.

While earning your degree for networking and telecommunications you will often have to write papers. Often times these papers will assume that things will go by the textbook, and completely neglect how the real world works. Below I feel is a perfect example.

Question: Users are complaining of slow downloads and are upset they cannot retrieve their erotica and email in a timly fashion. You check the firewall logs and notices there is a lot of ICMP traffic coming from one IP address, what do you do?

Answer: Normally in a textbook situation like this, it would simply be a matter of record the IP address it is coming from, block all traffic from that IP, and report the abuse to the ISP which that IP belongs. However that does not do the real world justice. Things are far more complex in a real office setting. Below is outlined how you would go about dealing with this situation.
After noticing the large amount of traffic coming from the IP you go to your boss to get a real quick okay to block the IP address. Of course, he tells you that a meeting needs to be scheduled to get this approved by management, and the proper paper work must be filed. You attempt to schedule a meeting for today, however all the needed people are out at a conference. The nearest available time is 4 days from now. All the while your internet traffic is slowing to a crawl because of a simple ping flood that you could have fixed days ago. Once the meeting takes place, you are informed that you are not allowed to make the needed changes, but the contracted firewall support specialist must come in and make that change that will take all of 5 minutes. So two weeks later when the support specialist shows up and you finally manage to explain to him the problem you are having, and he is done with his 5th coffee break in 2 hours, he gets around to blocking the IP. He says he is done, and leaves, however the logs show a different story. The doddering dolt blocked only UDP and the ping is coming across TCP. You once again try to fix it yourself, but are deferred to having to wait for the support fathead. After he comes and goes again (3 weeks have now passed) the pings have stopped, all seems to be well. Oh no, now it seems that he has blocked all internet traffic. You try to explain to all the managers this is the firewall guys fault because he doesnt know what he is doing, and that you could fix this in moments, however it is to late, you are handed a pink slip. Now jobless, and with a permanent black mark on your record, you attempt to find a new job, but to no avail. Who is going to hire a system admin that killed a whole companys internet after all? You attempt to file for welfare, but again are denied because you do not make the requirements of being poor trash. In the interim, your wife and child have left you, and you are now living out of a single room apartment located above the local pawn shop. In a moment of desperation for food you mug a small Asian woman and steal her purse, and take the cash with to the pawn shop. You purchase a semi automatic handgun with several rounds. With the remaining money you track down the S.O.B. who started that ping flood oh so long ago. After hitch hiking and doing several things you are not so proud of and that shant be repeated you are now at the door step of that life wrecking bastard. You kick in his door and lodge several pieces of smoking lead into that wanna be hacker script kiddie skull of his. Realizing what you done, you flee the scene and steal a nearby dump truck. After a quick stop to the hardware store and filling the rear end with enough fertilizer and lighter fluid to blow up a small country you lead the police on a high speed chase down several miles of highway. Running over any civilian dumb enough to get in the way, you spy your target, the regional power station. The police attempt to stop you, but their pitiful firearms are no match for your armored death wagon. Crashing through the last barricade and speeding ever closer to your final objective you throw a Molotov cocktail into the back of your vehicle of sweet pungent justice. After a quick moment of reflecting on your life, and to empty your bowels you take your high speed bomb truck careening through the wall and the last thing you see is a fiery explosion the likes of which not been seen since the big bang in genesis. The whole power grid for the metro area is down, and the city in plunged into chaos. The firewall is not configured because it along with 48% of all other electronics in the area have been subjected to massive electricity surge caused by the power plant going thermo nuclear. Your users internet traffic is still slow.