Viral Fever

I spent the last week battling some unknown forces that had laid siege on my computer. Everytime I tried to run any program even remotely related to the internet (doesn't leave much, barring perhaps MSDOS which I still remember our computer science teacher going through great pains to get into our heads in 7th grade) I got a whole series of windows which popped up (hence their being called "pop-ups"-ingenious I say) and tried to sell me cars, college degrees, antivirus softwares (a conspiracy or just ironic-who can tell?) and also promised to introduce me to some very lovely ladies in my neighborhood. Since I cant afford a car, already have one degree and can't really purchase the next one I'm vying for, would never pay for antivirus softwares (or for that matter for the lovely ladies- my conscience doesnt allow either-its company policy) I found those pop-ups quite trying as you may well imagine.

After trying everything I could I decided to call in the big guns as reinforcements and SOS'd(I think we can redefine SOS from "save our souls" to "save our softwares" in todays age considering we already sold our souls to the devil when we bought pirated software at palika bazar) 2-3 of my IT related friends for help. The first thing all of them said when I told them I might have a virus was "dude, you gotta quit surfing porn!". I could not quite fathom the reason for these allegations which i found utterly baseless(not to mention offensive!) especially because I hadnt been surfing porn(not lately at least!). I wasn't really able to make the correlation between beautiful women in cyberspace and malicious programs on my hard disk. Its seemingly like the layman who knows about HIV and Syphilis never thinks that he's going to get infected till he gets naughty and careless.

Fortunately though my computer seems to be well on the road to recovery and I apparently need to bolster its defenses and be a little more..ahem, discreet about what I do online. As my cousin put it, "No more unprotected internet surfing". He tried his best to give me my lessons about adware, spyware, trojans, worms, viruses and the like(I still cant tell one from the other, but i know they exist) but I will have to leave it as one of those things which I perhaps am not meant to fathom. And at the risk of repeating myself for the zillionth time, I shrug my shoulders, sigh and say that Computers and women are two things i will probably never understand! (Yes, I know women are not "things", and I do not intend to imply that either-I simply allude to their thought processes which I am perhaps not destined to comprehend-so I request the women's libbers out there to please refrain from igniting their lingerie over this.)