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As of my last post, Technical Difficulties, which was so long ago that it’s been archived in my mind, I had vague suspicions regarding my new smartphone‘s role in the untimely demise of my faithful Gateway laptop. Now, circumstantial evidence is piling up and tipping the scales of justice in ugly confirmation of the Optimus V’s unrepentant guilt. At this moment, I am writing this post into Notepad on an ancient Dell Latitude that cannot access the internet and I think my smartphone is responsible.
After the Gateway kicked the bucket, I was left with two geriatric laptops each holding one way tickets on the Worm Express to Recycle-ville and a desktop which had been subsequently promoted to the family workhorse. The desktop is also old, but we’ve never had any issues with it beyond the occasional easily eradicated virus. However, once my trusty laptop bought the farm, the desktop began having more serious issues. Coincidence? I think not.
First, it picked up some malware that would not only try to trick me into installing who-knows-what with fake virus scans and infiltration warnings, it would also not allow me to access any site on the internet but the one which “proves” that it’s a legitimate product and encourages me to purchase and install the program “for protection” as if it’s some cheesy Mafia goon running an insurance racket. When I ignored the “warnings” for too long trying to discover the magic words to banish the malware from my hard drive, a pornographic pop-up would appear to get my attention. Nice. My 7 year old son uses this computer. Thanks a lot, computer-virus-writing-jerks, that really made my day. I had no choice but to distract the boy with the Infinite Rufio Bros. app on my phone so that I could deal with the offending code and it’s slutty web girls clarion call. This proved to be about as difficult as Smeagol’s attempts to escape the insidious and malevolent grip of the One Ring.
Precious? Is that you?
My husband, who is no slouch in the I.T. arena, decided that the only solution was to wipe and reinstall the drive. This means that I have to reload, reconfigure and essentially rebuild everything to my exacting specifications in order to comfortably accomplish anything at all on the desktop. I will also have to set up my son’s profile so that he can easily get to his approved sites (Panfu, Lego, Nickelodeon, Cool Math4 Kids, etc.) without being subjected to pop-ups directing him to naked internet bimbos. Since this process will take some time, I have been relying on my smartphone to keep up with my email and satisfy my addiction to Facebook.
Then my niece asked us to burn a couple of DVDs for her which culminated in a mysterious intermittent DVD burner failure. Sometimes it works, but most of the time it doesn’t. When I sent her a text explaining why it is going take a little longer than expected for her to receive the disks, I could almost hear maniacal giggling coming from my smartphone.
Most recently, my inability to write efficiently using the Swype function on my Optimus and therefore work on any posts without suffering headaches and index finger cramps was causing severe blog withdrawal symptoms (depression, D.T.s, a decrease in narcissism and megalomania, fatigue, you know the drill), so I was determined to use the desktop to update totallytawn, regardless of whether it was restored to it’s former glory. That’s when my adorable 3 year old daughter decided that it was infinitely more important for me to sit on the couch with her and watch the new episode of Bubble Guppies than it was for me to do anything at all with the desktop in the office. The girl is cute and difficult to disobey. I decided to do both with the help of the Dell laptop…which somehow cannot access the internet anymore. And is so old that it suffers from Senior Moments in which it forgets what it was doing and has to be restarted. And is so slow that it would lose a race against molasses going uphill in winter by a wide margin.
(Insert long suffering sigh here)
As the Optimus rests innocently next to me, I can’t help but wonder two things: how did it convince the girl that she could not possibly watch Bubble Guppies without me and does it have the power to subjugate a Mac?