A Reprieve...

Oh, how I miss my laptop!

Much as I have cursed the thing, and called it a glorified doorstop, now that I don’t have it, I WANT it.

I had to take it to the ‘puter doctor the other day. I needed to find out why it refused to connect to the internet through my cable connection at the café.

‘Puter Doctor told me I had most likely picked up some kind of "malicious software" from the internet. Told me all kinds of scary stories about why "hackers" would want to control MY computer… Something about how a hacker recruits a whole legion of computers so that they can do his dirty work...perhaps shutting down "Amazon" for a day by flooding it with requests.

All I could think of was, there are too many people out there with WAAAAYYYY too much time on their hands…

And then, I thought (and I SAID to the computer geek…) that the only reason I HAVE a computer is that one can hardly function without one these days. But I have neither the time nor the inclination to have to BABYSIT it all the time. I mean, he gave me a list about ten miles long of all the things I needed to do to keep my computer "safe" from internet ne’er-do-wells.

I pay a decent chunk of money for Internet Security and "Spy Sweeper" programs. I guess I just expect them to do their jobs and leave me out of it. But, noooo…. I’m supposed to spend about a jillion hours a week safeguarding my computer from hackers. BLEAH!

I swear, after hearing all that, I was ready to just heave the thing into the Columbia and be done with it.

But then there is my journal. And AOL.

Interesting thing about AOL. Apparently, those in the know will refuse to load AOL onto a computer.

They think of it as the next best thing to a virus. My personal computer geek said that AOL infiltrates WAY to much of one’s hard drive… So, while they were contemplating having to cure my laptops ills by completely wiping out the hard drive and reloading it from the ground up, they told me they would not reload AOL onto it.

Hmmmmmm…. Gives one pause, doesn’t it? I have been paying monthly, for the past almost ten years, for a virus?

Still, I don’t have time to try to figure out how I would maintain access to "Coming to Terms…" without AOL.

So it was a relief, both to me and to AOL (or not...) for me to learn today from the computer geeks that they did not have to, after all, wipe out my hard drive and start over.

AOL has gotten, at least for the time being, a reprieve.

Do you think they care?