I Wanna Devise a Virus to Bring Dire Straits To Your Environment.Here's a story about my brother. I spent the weekend in Reno visiting with him, his son, and my mom. I love my brother but he is a hard guy to get along with. He's sullen, and negative, moody, and (quite frankly) pretty self-centered. If you can get past all that and get him to lighten-up a little he's an alright guy.
He's recently gone through some difficult times with his ex-girlfriend and is currently living with my mom. Most of my visits to Reno are focused on seeing my mom and I get very little time to hang out with Sean. Not this visit. Sean and I even hit the town on a couple of the nights I was there. One of these outings involved a piano bar. I suppose the piano bar thing is fun if you can get past the fact that the people on stage are only one-step above wacky morning DJs. The whole experience was just that much more surreal when experienced with my brother. His personality doesn't really mesh well with that goofy party atmosphere.
One of the highlights of Sean time came when he asked me to take a look at his "broken" computer. In this case "broken" means "completely infested with viruses and spy-ware". I looked things over, cracked my knuckles, and advised my brother to get comfortable as this would take a while.
So began a long painful process of uninstalling a ton of programs (including a ridiculous piece of software that disguised itself as an anti-virus tool but really pasted ads up all over your windows), setting up anti-virus, running virus scans, etc.
The whole time my brother is pissing and moaning about how terrible his machine is and what a "piece of crap" he has to deal with.
I try to explain to him that even though viruses and spy-ware can be very sneaky, his problems were mostly the result of being an irresponsible user. This of course was an insult to him. He would reply in a voice full of shock and outrage, "I know how to use the internet. I didn't do anything wrong".
(This leads me to another on of his more charming traits. Dishonesty and defensiveness.)
"Sean" I said, "Look at this keyboard! Does this look like the keyboard of a responsible user!?"
My brother stood silent for a moment and than mumbled, "I guess I'll go buy another keyboard". He went off to Best Buy while I stayed behind and let the Virus scan do it's thing (it came up with over 200 objects and 15 trojans). He also didn't have any drivers installed for his video card which was putting a damper on the machines performance as well.
After about 2 or 3 hours I had the machine running great. I gave him a number of helpful instructions on how to avoid this stuff in the future and left him to surf the internet.
I wandered back into the room a few minutes later and found him hunched over the keyboard with a look of frustration across his face. Moving to see what happened I notice (amongst the myriad of pop-up windows springing up across the screen) that Sean had installed one of those random search engine tool bars onto his firefox browser.
So I lost it.
"SEAN! What the FUCK is that doing there?"
"What?"
"That fucking random-ass tool bar on your browser?! Why did you download that?!"
"I DIDN'T!"
At this point I blow my brains out. Or at least I wanted to.
How am I related to this guy again?
-E
Labels: Family, Reno, Travel
