The stupid tree makes another appearance

To set the scene on this one you will need to understand the following:

Around 8 months ago, our wonderous IT department installed the new "improved" anti virus on all our laptops. This had the effect of making my machine unusable for the first 15 minutes after startup as it automatically scanned for virus's. It also for some reason hooked into my email program and if I stopped the scan prematurely it tended to make Outlook as slow as a child eating vedgies.

In January I finally had complained enough, that said IT dept. had a look at my Laptop and pronounced the registery corrupt. Their solution? Re-Install OS.

After gritting my teeth, I agreed, muttering death threats if I lost any important information.

Francis reinstalled the OS and my laptop worked like an athlete on steriods.

The one issue..... all my downloaded programs had vanished into the ether.

And that dear readers - sets the scene for my brush with the stupid tree.

(well not so much of a brush as loud sound of crashing through the branches of said tree, lifting myself up and promptly crashing through the stupid tree again and again)

Nessers has recently installed 512kb broadband. The non African readers of my blog will not understand what a quantam leap 512kb is to us african people, but it was like the entire world of the internet was finally opened.

I climbed onto the bandwidth like a druggie who has not had his fix for a week!

Useful program after useful program was downloaded. Irfan view, Adobe Professional, Tools for my Sony P910i, Yahoo, Updates for my camera etc etc.

And then came the time to make it all work together.

For some reason one of the downloaded program's was an evaluation version. I needed a key. Now I do not do piracy (often). But in this case I had the original program, but could not for the life of me find the activation key. The software key was in Ghana (odds are) where I had put a whole pile of CD's etc in my bedside drawer.

From my misspent youth, I knew that crack sites are available on the web and happily toodled off to make use of the crack. Not piracy - expediancy.

Everyone who uses crack sites KNOW!!! that you do not download any files from the site. If the key is not immediatly available, you find another link. DO NOT DOWNLOAD ANY FILES!!!! DO NOT!!!!

Find the crack and up pops a " Do you wish to download file something.zip". I am computer aware, I am in a hurry, you cannot access the key without downloading the file, it is a zip file - needs to be extracted first of course..... I download it!

I hear the sound of thuds as the file takes over my PC, I hear the sound of me crashing through the branches of the stupid tree..... I swear like a sailor!!!

This cute little virus happily finds my anti virus and uninstalls it.... and promptly drops 312 files of infected usefulness onto my pc. Takes over my browser and does other disasterous things.

My computer now needs to head back to IT, my head down and a blush visible as I ask them to once again, reinstall my OS.

I am blushing? Damn right I am - I should know better!!!

and to the fool that wrote the virus.. (most probably the vendor of the software I was trying to crack), may your mother find you and ban you from touching a PC again.

Did Nessers and Esther laugh when I told them about this.... you bet they did!! I have a holier than thou attitude about getting virus, as in "you have to be bloody stupid to catch a virus". They will rip me off about this for months to come!!

I look at the stupid tree and shake my head!