08-23-01 @ 3:47 am EDT

Oh yeah, one more thing! (I'm starting to sound like Columbo here--eegh!!) Re: June's virus scare. Ma comes home all flustered and says, "YEP, that was it--her computer crashed."

"What happened?" I ask. And yes, in the manner of Ma telling stories, it's very drawn out and takes many detours and dead ends and such. But the gist of it...

Ma turned on June's computer and it worked fine at first, and she went online to go to HouseCall. But it kept freezing up when it was like 95% done. So, she went to PC-cillin or whatever that is and downloaded it, but--the computer pulled some kind of thing on her, and she had to do a Control+Alt+Delete. Restarting the computer revealed that all the icons and the wallpaper had been lost. ("That's restore active desktop, Ma," I explained; "it pulls that on me all the time." ) She tried restarting it again, only...it brought up a black screen and told her to insert the system disk or something. Everything wiped out.

She managed to restore it with the recovery disks, but she's hoping June had all her PrintShop files saved to disk. She spent a lot of time on the phone talking to a help guy who told her to run MSconfig to look for Sircam. Computer didn't find it.

Ma's still thinking they were hit, but I don't think so. She also got an e-mail from PC-cillin saying no viruses were found, so I guess she managed to scan it before it crashed. She thinks PC-cillin might be responsible. Nahhh. They would check for problems like that. I think it was just the proper confluence of events that led to the thing crashing. Sure, she was sent the virus, but from what little I read it doesn't always infect you or destroy your hard drive. I think Windows and IE are just full of crap to pull on their poor unsuspecting users. God knows how many times I've had to restore the active desktop because of errors THE COMPUTER pulled!

Anyway, bla bla...I'm just sitting here saying, "I told you about this virus weeks ago, and you said she read about it in the paper. WHY DID SHE OPEN THAT ATTACHMENT?!"

"Because she saw her cousin's name on the e-mail, and she thought it was safe..."

"Didn't she read the whole article? That's how these things spread--they WANT you to think they're from friendly people!" Then I pause. "You'd better have her call this cousin of hers and tell her her hard drive is infected, since the virus was sent from her address."

And Ma says--"No..."

?$*E$HER@*($!!! WHAT?!?

"Ma," I say, slowly and clearly, "the virus had her cousin's name on it. That means it was sent from her cousin's address book. MEANING, the virus has infected her cousin's hard drive, and may RUIN IT if we don't tell her. June should tell her about this, and tell her to call EVERYONE in her address book, and to have any of THEM who may have opened the e-mail tell anyone THEY have in THEIR address books. Or else they're all going to be very sorry."

And all the while I'm thinking...

SOME PEOPLE SHOULD NOT BE ALLOWED NEAR COMPUTERS!!