A few months ago, I provided IT service for a small company where my uncle was a manager. Usually I came into the office a few hours after lunch to fix an assortment of issues, such as fixing printers, systems updates, installing anti-virus here and there, and so on.
One fateful day I got a call from an accountant:
Me: “IT Support, how can I be of service?”
A: “I need some help with my computer. Google is shrinking!”
Me: “Google is… shrinking?”
A: “Yes it is. It’s been getting smaller for some weeks now, and now it’s so small I can hardly type!”
Me: “I… I… I’m on my way”
I walked down those corridors flabbergasted. What on earth could that possibly even mean? When I arrived at the Accountant’s desk, she very politely thanked me for my help, and stepped aside to let me look to the computer. She pointed at Internet Explorer and told me that she was having issues with Google – it was shrinking.
Google had indeed shrunk. She had SO. MANY. TOOLBARS. Lines of toolbars were filling up the screen so much that only 5 cm of the page was visible, so you could barely see the Google search bar and its logo.
I told her I would need to take the computer, as the issue seemed a bit more complicated, and spent the next day and a half uninstalling tons of addware, including a Satan-designed Chinese adware/malware that added an extra option on the right click menu in Chinese, kept trying to change the homepage, and “shielded” itself from being deleted or having its process interrupted. By the end of it, the Anti-Malware software had detected something like 7000 threats.
The Accountant got her computer back, nice and clean and with no administrator privileges.
She called me after a few days complaining that the ceiling fan was blowing away the Wi-Fi!
– Reddit user, guto8797