Feb 4th, 2008
Superbowl commercials, a broken window, and a virus
This morning, after being startled by two of my sons arguing over who had the longest turn playing Guitar Hero, and still not quite ready to get out of bed, I grabbed the remote control and started up the DVR recording of the Super Bowl. As my eyes were still trying to focus, I sped forward to the first commercial break then hit play.
It’s not just that I’m not a big football fan; I’m also too impatient to sit through three hours of anything. That’s what’s so great about commercials. Say it in 30 seconds and you’re done. But I was barely through the first Budweiser commercial when I heard our front door slam. My wife walked in the room, threw the car keys at me and told me to go get the car unstuck out of the snow. Oh, and the back window is broken too.
After weeks of heavy snowstorms here in Utah, getting up and digging out the car has been a pretty regular occurrence. Last night we got about 10cm, so I tromped through the snow out to the car. Sure enough, there it was stuck in a snow bank at the end of our driveway with a tree branch going through the back window.
“Great,” I thought, “I’m going to have to get out of my pajamas for this one.”
Now to most people getting out of pajamas is probably a normal thing but when you have worked out of your home for ten years I might as well be putting on a tuxedo.
Yeah, so what, I sit around all day in my pajamas. In my house everyone is used to it. When I tell my wife I need more work clothes, she asks me if I want flannel or fleece.
My kids really have no concept of what a real job is. All they know is that I secure things and I write things, and that somehow involves sitting at a computer all day in your pajamas. Of course, they don’t quite understand the distinction between work time on the computer and play time on the computer so that adds to the confusion.
Parent-Teacher conferences are always fun because my kids always have creative ways of explaining what their father does for a living. “So, I hear you’re a hacker?” a teacher once asked me with some concern. “I understand your work involves playing video games all night?” another one asked, somewhat confused.
So I got out of my pajamas and into some real clothes to dig the car out, and then drop it off at the glass repair shop.
The whole point of all this is that after getting back from the repair shop I sat down at my computer.
To my shock there was a virus warning. That virus scanner that has sat there, along with all the others over the years doing nothing actually reported that I had a virus.
I haven’t had a virus in years—people like me aren’t supposed to get viruses.
I always do everything right plus a lot of other things that most people wouldn’t even think of. But there it was, with a big red warning icon: Found 1 infected files. I was shocked, were the shoemaker’s children actually shoeless? Where did I fail? What is the world coming to? Ok a broken window I can put up with, but a VIRUS?!
At this point I had had enough. I just gave up, got back into my pajamas, laid in my bed, then hit play on the DVR that was still paused at the Budweiser commercial.
