<< Culture Shock Bites Back | Home | Becoming my Childhood Nightmare >>
I Need a Better Part-Time Job
There was a point in high school where I wanted to major in Computer Science and become a software engineer. I loved, and in fact still love, computers and the challenge of making things work—of making these literal-minded machines slowly turn into smart, powerful tools. I dabbled in writing (and modifying) code for my own amusement for a little while—the occasional perl script here, a chunk of altered Javascript there, but I realized I didn’t have the aptitude for it and decided to focus on different things.
Sometimes, I look at the mountain of student debt that forms after four years at a private (American) university, and wonder if I made the wrong choice. But then there are afternoons like this one, when all I can do is sigh happily in relief.
I bought a Mac last year, and I use it happily. But I used a Wintel PC for many years, and am intimately familiar with most versions of Windows going back to Win 3.1—the only one I haven’t used in some fashion is Windows Moron Edition (by all accounts, I haven’t missed much)—which gave me the part-time job of being my extended family’s Troubleshooter-in-Residence. People call me when they buy unformatted floppies by mistake, when they’ve got driver and registry issues, when their printers won’t print, etc. You get the idea.
So, it should come as no big shock that when my cousin, sitting at my parents’ PC this afternoon, became the latest victim of a hijacked browser, she yelled my name. She told me how she was happily surfing the Web when all these popup windows appeared at once, how more and more appeared when she tried to close them, how she restarted the computer in a fit of panic, and how now nothing would load for her online. Even in Mozilla Firefox. And, for that matter, AIM and MSN Messenger were acting funky, too. (HELP?!?!?!?!?)
I put my wannabe-comp-sci-geek hat on and went to work. I downloaded Window Washer on my Powerbook, burned it to a CD, and installed it on the PC, and ran a spyware scan. I updated definitions and checked for viruses. I double-checked that the firewall was on. I ran Windows Update. I deleted the Temporary Files and emptied the Recycle Bin. And I restarted, a lot.
All in all, I was lucky; once I got rid of the 37 spyware components that were lurking around the system—some of them for months now—and restarted, everything worked fine. And now that my cousin’s promised to use Firefox, we shouldn’t have to go through this again.
It’s a damn good thing, too. Because if I ever need to spend over an hour on basic computer maintenance again, I’m going to start charging for my time. Or run away to a remote part of the world still untouched by the Information Revolution. Because this isn’t rocket science—I don’t have a degree in this stuff, and it’s all freely available online. And because of that, I’m a little resentful about being your Computer Nanny. I understand that computers can be fickle beasts, but there is a difference between helping you through Quirky Computing (Part XVII) and Basic Computer Safety (Part I). Educate yourself.
Let this be your first lesson, boys and girls: don’t continue using unpatched systems and insecure software. If you’re using Windows, switch to a secure browser (like Firefox or Opera), get (and use and regularly update) virus protection and a firewall, scan for spyware regularly, and download Windows security patches. I know restarting’s a pain, but they’re there for a reason. And it’s far less inconvenient than a computer that’s out of your control.
Especially if your Troubleshooter-in-Residence has decided to take a vacation day when you need her.
<< Culture Shock Bites Back | Home | Becoming my Childhood Nightmare >>