Bug bytes

It’s a common enough occurrence in today’s modern world. One morning, you wake up and say to yourself, “Damn, I need some wi-fi in this joint.” I felt very strongly that it was time to have the “surfing on the laptop while drinking Margaritas on the patio” option here at the house.

The next step—purchase of the router and its installation. Here, often, is where simple good intentions bog down. The router installation proves, to put it mildly, tricky. Time to call the professionals. One look in the Yellow Pages shows that many folks out there have figured out there’s a living to be made by making computer house calls. Not just geek squads, but nerd squads, dweeb squads, freek squads and even semi-normal people squads. Aplenty.

I called one of those traveling techno-doctors, and within three hours, my man Ryan showed up ready to get me over the router hump. Predictably, the job proves quite simple, solvable and do-able. Yes! Time to stock up on the marg mix. Ryan fixed up the router and got it all good in about 20 minutes, and he then said he should really do a cleanup of my desktop, suspecting that it’s riddled with bad junk and toxic funk. I suspected he’s absolutely right, and gave him the green light to proceed, thinking my desktop is currently home to more viruses than a CDC floor mop.

The clean-up took, but bore fruit. Lots of fruit. Fruit that was blown up, dumped and mangled by Ryan’s various junk-hunting programs. Cyber-melons of digital villainy planted by strange pasty-faced cretins in far off countries, melons that were thrown off the top floor of my virtual building, splattering into juicy mush upon collision with the virtual street below. Go get ’em, Ryan. Kick ass, brother.

For his finale, Ryan inserted a disc with his special hunting program, software that tracks down the deepest, nastiest parasites in the bowels of my hard drive. After a few minutes, I asked how it was going in there, “there” being the guts of my plague-packing desktop. “Not so good,” declared Ryan. “The program that was gonna find your Big Bug and kill it off just got killed. By the Bug itself.” Uh-oh. The hunter becomes the hunted. Who knew what drama lurked in the dangerous backstreets of my circuitries?

“Tell you what,” continued Ryan, as he retrieved his disc from my Dark Machine. “Get all your stuff on this computer backed up on a storage unit. Then disconnect it, unplug it, and set it in your closet somewhere. Maybe even take it out to the garage. Put it some place where the next person who sees it is an archeologist. What you have here is basically a boat anchor. Or something to set on your hot tub cover to make sure it doesn’t blow away in the next windstorm. Are you feelin’ me here?”