It can motivate.
It's a tool that's used by partisans on both sides. (If you doubt that some on the left use the fear card as well, just check out any election year cover of The Nation.) We've decried the use of fear as a political weapon. We see it as self-defeating in the long run and only more so since we've noticed how often those on our side (the left) use the fear card.
But people play the fear card because it can be (temporarily) very effective.
I found that out Saturday morning.
I see myself as someone with your average amount of net and computer savy. And yet there I was acting like a complete fool. Worse than a complete fool. I was in total panic and forking over personal information.
My boyfriend was back east with his family. Everyone here was asleep (Betty, her kids, Jim and Dona). I know because I was very noisy moving through the house to the kitchen, hoping someone would stick their head out and say, "Hey, Ty, want to watch a movie?" But everyone was asleep. It had been a long work week because there's a lot of work that goes into creating buzz ahead of Academy Award nominations. Or trying to create buzz. So after making a bunch of noise and failing to wake anyone, I went back to my room and booted up the laptop.
I was streaming Old Dogs at Netflix and going through our e-mails here when I suddenly had a huge problem.
I had a ton of infections on my computer. Nothing but infections. I got a message and then another and then another and, in fact, on the bottom right-hand side of the screen, it was one balloon after another.
I was freaking out. I didn't know what to do. It was infecting my system and there were trojans and there was this and there was that.
I had semi-installed an AVG upgrade the day before. Semi-installed? AVG wants to shut you down without warning in the upgrade. It did it once. When it tried to the second time, I was in the middle of working on a press release for my real job, I just stopped the installation. So I was wondering if that had left me vulnerable or if I'd gone to some site I shouldn't have or what?
Now the messages were telling me that things were going to stop working because it was infecting my system and my registry. And it kept asking me if I wanted to install a security upgrade. For fifty-something dollars. I'd said no repeatedly because I didn't know the program but as all these warnings kept popping up, I was freaking out.
I grabbed my credit card and started entering my information. My name. My credit card. It's expiration date. I'd just entered the three digit security code and was about to start on my mailing address when my desk top filled the whole screen and was suddenly blue bricks with a message of how I needed to buy this security upgrade now or I was risking myself, my job, my wife, my . . .
Wife? I'm not married and I'm a gay man.
It did make me laugh.
And then it reminded me of Single White Female, how Bridget Fonda's character installs this billing software on her client's computers and how, if they don't pay on time, it automatically erases all the data.
Laughing and thinking of that was the only reason that, when I pulled the screen back up with my info on it, I closed it out without proceeding.
I was that close to giving a perfect stranger that information.
I was still getting all these messages about infections and I didn't know what to do. Ava, C.I., Kat, Wally and Jess were at Trina's which meant a three hour time difference. Meaning that although it was 2:30 here, it was 5:30 there. I knew not to call Kat. She sleeps in. That left Jess, Wally, Ava and C.I. I tried Jess but no answer. I tried C.I. and Wally but no answer. Then I got Ava. She explained Jess was in the shower but C.I., Wally and Mike were out running.
I told her how infected my laptop was and she kept saying, "Don't panic, don't panic." Which led us to laugh about the car crash in Nine to Five. (Jane Fonda: What happened?" Dolly Parton: "She panicked.") She told me to shut it down and she'd get C.I. to call me back in a few minutes. I said sure and hung up and tried to shut it down but couldn't.
I had several screens open so let me plug Mozilla Firefox here. During all of this, I was attempting to find out about this security package that was being sold and I couldn't pull anything up on Explorer. Mozilla was able to pull up things. It took forever, but it was still working which may have to do with the extra security that browser has.
But I couldn't shut the thing down. If I tried to go to "shutdown," it didn't work. I couldn't access the start menu. I also couldn't access task manager despite repeated attempts.
I was still in a panic when C.I. called and said, "Unplug the laptop and remove the battery. That will shut it down."
Which I did do. Then C.I. got me to reboot and launch windows in safe mode. From there, she had me do a system restore to an earlier date and that knocked it out. I then ran a security program and that walled off or removed the problem which was Security Tool.
Security Tool is actually a virus and it attaches yourself to your computer, informs you of mythical infections and problems, freezes your ability to do most things and gets you to fork over your credit card information. It's a scam.
And it's a probably a successful one because I consider myself pretty average and I'm sure many others are as freaked out by the performance Security Tool virus puts on when it's attacking your machine.
I do not give out my information easily. For example, this week at Borders I bought a couple of hundred dollars in books (this was for work and I was reimbursed) and I was asked if I wanted to sign up -- just 20 bucks a year! -- for a new Borders' rewards program. This one would allow me to not just have to bring in coupons for discounts. I was all for it and handing him $20. He (the clerk) says, "No, I have to put it on your card. And then we'll bill you $20 each year or you can check this space and we'll only do it one time . . ." Now I like Borders but I was not comfortable with that and called for a manager who agreed to take $20 in cash because I did not want to give away my credit card number to something that could potentially charge me each year without my permission.
That's one example but I get teased because I'm always doing things like that and I think most of us do, I don't think I'm anything special when it comes to taking precautions.
But there I was, Saturday morning, ready to fork over everything. Ready to give up anything just so my laptop could be 'safe.' (Thereby allowing me to feel safe.) And Ava was telling me, on the phone, "Ty, there are two laptops in C.I.'s bedroom. Go grab one of those. She's not going to mind." That should have called me down. At that point, I should have been calm. But even so, I wasn't. And I was thinking, "I don't want another laptop, I want mine!"
Maybe you've seen that episode of Sex In The City where Carrie's boyfriend of the moment is remodeling their apartment and her laptop goes on the fritz? She's told it's dead and she'll have to get a new one. She doesn't want a new one because she has all of her writing on it and this on it and that on it and . . .
I didn't care about any of that. Why I didn't want to switch to a new laptop is I didn't want to have to go through all the crap of installing (and logging into) my wireless program and the same with the DSL hook up. I'm just too damn lazy. And also, I write that stuff down -- passwords and log ons -- and then forget where I put it because I hide it and I've hidden it from myself. So a new computer would just be a pain in the ass.
And around the time I started thinking about that was around the time I actually stopped stressing. Which just goes to show you that humanity invented bitching for a reason: It helps us cope.