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The Boggs have had Better Days!

Yesterday wasn't one of the better days for the Boggs boys and mom.

It started out with an early morning phone call from the guy working on my laptop.  Who assured me earlier that many times on other computers he had gotten rid of the same trojan/virus that slipped past my anti-virus defenses and did wacky, not-so-wonderful things to my computer. 

First it popped up a screen from a so-called trail version of program that fixed computer hard drives.  Saying it had scanned mine and found 7 critical or dangerous problems, and my computer was unstable. Asked me to send $85 to get the full version of the program to get it fixed.  Fortunately, I was a little leery since I did NOT remember having such a program on my computer, and they did NOT get my credit card information.

Then my computer became possessed and had voices muttering sporadically behind the blue screen of death. 

But no worries, says the computer doc, he's been fixing a lot of computers with this problem.  Yeah, well that was before he started actually working on MY laptop.

Now he's not so sanguine about it.  Says it's the nastiest variant of this problem he's ever seen.  My computer has the dubious distinction of being the 'fastest & worstest infected' he's seen with this.  Tells me it's burrowed into the worst place possible, the master boot record.  He keeps trying to fix it, and it keeps throwing up blue screens of death.  But he'll keep trying!

Then Jonathan needed to go have his brakes checked.  Been a little squeaky, soft, whatever.  On the way to the shop, he had a flat tire.  He put on the spare and drove on.  Once he got there, and the guys got to working on the car, they told him they hated to be bearers of bad news, but his spare tire was now flat too.

Oh, and by the way, you need to replace everything to do with brakes, and we want a huge hunk of money to do it.  Then after that, you can go somewhere else and get your tire repaired.

By the time the brakes were done, and the tire repaired, he got home in enough time to take a shower and get ready for an evening shift at work.

In the meantime, I saw on Facebook where Richard and Chrystie came home to a partially flooded basement.  No, that is definitely NOT a good thing either.  Having dealt with that more times than I care to remember, it is not fun at all.

And the day wasn't done with Jonathan either.  When he got home from work and walked in the basement door, there was a baby snake hissing at him.  Creepy!  (Time for new weather stripping to seal the door from air, snakes & spiders!)

As for my sick laptop, I got another phone call this morning.  It seems like my laptop is going to have to be reborn.  Wiped clean.  Start over.  Rise like a Phoenix from the ashes.  Why?  Because he can't get rid of all the little bits and pieces of virus hiding there, so he's got to put the master boot record back to factory newness... and no programs left behind.

Makes me want to cry when I think how much work it's going to be to get all my business documents and programs back on there.

The ironic thing about all this is that last week I was looking at external disk drives thinking to get one to use for a backup of all the stuff on my laptop, since it's my work computer.  But we're going to be gone, and I decided I'd do it when we got back from the beach so it wouldn't be delivered while we are gone.

Gotta love that irony stuff.

Okay, better days are coming.  Visiting the Canadian Clan.  Sand castles on the beach!  Good food!  Good times!

Ah, next week... life's a real beach.

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