There are few things more terrifying in the modern world than getting a computer virus.
That is some irresponsible hyperbole right there. Hell, day to day living is already pretty terrifying depending on one’s baseline state of existential dread. Where’s your baseline on the dread scale? Usually, I'm at a nice Camus, but recently I've been verging into a bit of Kierkegaard, soon it won't be long before I'm at a Zizek and then we'll be really going off the rails.
Anyway, I got to thinking about my experiences with computer viruses after my boomer boss fell for a phishing scam and we spent a jolly several days fixing everything. It’s easy to make fun of people of a certain generation for falling for the most obvious internet shenanigans, but I wasn’t always internet savvy myself. Hell, I don’t know if I’m even all that savvy — when robocalls leave me voicemails about how my social security is in danger, I still run the phone number through Google to make sure it’s bunk even though it clearly is.
I’m very paranoid about digital security. During the writing of this blog post I saw an email from Facebook saying that someone had requested a password reset two months ago and it sent me into a panicky tailspin which cost me at least an hour of work and four days off my life.
But I did some very dumb non-savvy things regarding internet safety when I was younger. So let’s talk about the time I got a dumb computer virus from being dumb.
“oh shit oh fuck oh christ oh shit shit shit fuck christ” — Drew Petriello, circa 2012
You know when the best time is for a computer virus?
Midterms.
It was the first semester of college. I was stressed. I had a short story due for Intro to Creative Writing. There was a test coming up for my stupid freaking Freshman Foundations Course about the minutiae of education acts passed in the United States that I just did not give a fuck about but needed to study for nonetheless. Oh yeah, and this was during the time I was rushing a fraternity.
Remember how that was a thing? It seems almost like it never happened. But yeah, I once upon a time was in a fraternity. It lasted Freshman year.
Of course, I didn't join a dudebro fraternity. No, I had to go and join the weird one with all of the weird outcasts who were all weird.
I was procrastinating studying for the aforementioned dumb stupid dumb education midterm on my laptop. A notification for a system update appeared onscreen. I clicked the install button, giving it permission to do its thing in the background while I did anything but study.
In my horribly bored web surfing, I was so horribly bored that my hand boredom-spasmed and I accidentally clicked a banner ad and wound up on a sketchy website advertising the joys of knowing your social security number is safe and secure, in fact, you know what would make it super safe and secure? Typing it in this convenient website you’ve just stumbled into — lucky you! We’ll keep your SSN so so so safe, like it were our very own newborn, that’s how seriously we take your security.
Accidental clicks happen. I clicked away to safety. And boredom.
I was procrastinating on Wikipedia now, hitting that random article button, hoping for something interesting, when Chrome notified my that my download had finished.
Cool, the update's done, I thought.
I clicked the little run program icon and then suddenly a dialog box that looked like it was unearthed from a Windows 98 digital time capsule appeared in the middle of the screen.
There was a moment of confusion followed by dawning horror. Looking at the download bar on Chrome, there were two files there, one being from that sketchy ass helpful SSN protecting website I accidentally went to. I hadn’t been paying close enough attention and told that one to boot up.
Feverishly, I tried to click out of the WIndows 98 box, but a little robot appeared in it, followed by a progress bar.
"Deleting files," it said.
Oh fuck oh fuck oh -
My laptop audio unleashed a horrible, grinding, glitchy sound that preceded the whole thing shutting down.
And shut down it was.
Except.
My laptop fan was still blowing. And it wasn't stopping. It just kept on blowing as though a mini cyclone were localized to my motherboard.
I showed the laptop to a friend of mine and he said that he had something similar happen. A virus that kept his fan whirring and it actually melted his hard drive.
"I mean, I doubt your laptop will combust," he said. "But..." he shrugged.
I probably screeched something to the effect of "NOT HELPFUL," and ran off.
For real in a panic now, I ran the laptop over to the library where the student tech support center was, explained the issue and left it with them.
A fraught, laptopless day later, I returned to the tech support center.
“Yeah, we just let the battery drain,” some dweeb chewing gum said. “See?” he held it up, “fan’s not blowing anymore. But it won’t turn on. Is it under warranty? Hope it’s under warranty.”
“Fuck you, dweeb,” I said.
I didn’t say that.
It was still under warranty and I shipped it off to the manufacturer.
Although it wasn’t as simple as that because it’s never as simple as that.
Not only did I have to wait for the manufacturer to send me a ~*~sPeCiAl BoX~*~ to send it in, but the most fun came when I had to grovel in the mailroom to please please please ship it today because they weren’t going to be sending out any more mail until Monday and oh, I just couldn’t go without my laptop, look at me! Look at how adorably my lip is trembling!
An upperclassman in my major was working there and she did take pity on me. Although I could have done without the look that said “Oh you poor helpless child,” but it’s what I deserved I guess.
In the two weeks I was laptopless, I got to experience the joys of being tech-free. I paid more attention to the world around me. Sparrows nurtured their children on tree branches, and I appreciated the miracle of life. Air tasted better. My blood pressure dropped. My colon was cleaner than a Goop devotee’s. A worrying spot that looked like skin cancer faded away. I discovered love.
Yeah, fuck no, I was a panicky sweaty mess for two weeks — do you know how badly I needed to use my laptop all the jizzgobbling time in college?! What, I’m supposed to use the library computers are you a goddamn loon?! How dare you suggest such a —
I got familiar enough with the library computers to know that never wanted to have to rely on them again.
With all of the time that would have normally been devoted to Dumb Internet Bullshit™, I was able to reflect on the other time I was a dum-dum and got a computer virus.
Oh yeah, did I mention there was another time? Well, yeah, there was another time.
Like a CW show, let’s get way too interested in dredging up high school dumbfuckery
Back in high school, I was the dweeby nerdy type. I mean, I'm still the dweeby nerdy type, but back then I was… moreso. Like, I saw “video game designer” as a career option for myself. I attempted to learn how to mod with the Source Engine and I had taken a class in school about 3D animation which was… fine. That class was fine. I had some small coding skills (that I have since completely forgotten) and I dabbled around in a cheap video game maker program.
I had very real pretensions towards being a video game designer. I couldn’t tell you when, but at some point in high school, the desire left me. It was raging strong for a while there. The thought does occasionally float through my noggin that it might be a fun and unique challenge to create a game though. Although my inclination these days would be more to create a board game or a TTRPG but...
Okay, you're waxing wistfully about a path in life you didn't take. Get on track.
So as a video game obsessed teen who was interested in learning how to make video games, I was not above the odd illegal download or two. He said, as if those two things have anything to do with each other.
This was not a very long phase in my life and FBI, if you're reading this, my current computer is COMPLETELY CLEAN I PROMISE.
For about a year, I had uTorrent on my computer. I can't remember too much of what I downloaded back in the day, but there were a couple of games that I never actually got around to playing and a version of Maya (a 3D modeling software) that I then immediately got rid of because I felt actually quite guilty about downloading a $400 piece of professional software. I was never big on music downloading because I was a very lucky child who was plied with a fairly constant supply of iTunes gift cards. Yeah, I was that guy from a family with enough money to acquire all of his music legally.
There was also this program called FPS Creator that I downloaded. I also went and downloaded ALL OF THE EXPANSION SOFTWARE.
As the name might suggest, it was an easy-to-use game engine designed specifically for First Person Shooters. It came with a bunch of premade assets so you wouldn't have to, you know, actually make 3d models and textures.
Mm, that was a boring sentence. IT TOOLS. MAKE GAEM. DO IT E-Z.
Not any good games, mind you. I spent an entire day downloading the main program and every single one of the expansion asset collections only to then, the next day, go on the company's website, find one of the top-rated games made with the program, play it and see that it was utter garbage. The movement controls were slow, the reloading took forever, the aiming was wonky, the environments were dull, the enemy AI had the survival instinct of lemmings who stopped taking their Lexapro… it was bad.
I didn't want to make bad games. So I destroyed it from my hard drive.
And I did my due diligence with my piracy, dammit! I knew what to look for in terms of potential viruses, the main clue being a suspiciously small file size.
There was a day when I completely stopped though all piracy, duly diligent or otherwise, and that was the day I got a virus.
Because sometimes, I'm a really big dumb big stupid bad dumb fool idiot ass idiot.
Being a dweeby teen who had pretensions towards being a video game designer one day, I decided that, you know what I needed to have on my computer? A way to run Linux. That way, I could completely customize my operating system and really learn how to play around with coding and… honestly? I hadn't thought too hard about it. I just knew that if you ran Linux it meant you were hardcore. I wanted to be hardcore.
So I went over to the Pirate Bay and downloaded Linux.
This was dumb for so many reasons, but the big one is: YOU DON'T NEED TO PIRATE LINUX.
YOU FUCKING FOOL.
LINUX IS FREE. YOU CAN JUST... YOU CAN DOWNLOAD IT FROM SOMEWHERE THAT DOESN'T HAVE A LOGO OF A PIRATE GALLEON COMPLETE WITH A JOLLY RODGER.
But for some reason, I decided that nah, pirating it was the way to go. I blame undiagnosed brainworms for my actions, your honor.
My second mistake was not doing my usual ~*~dUe DiLiGeNcE~*~
The file size was small, but I didn't know what an operating system's file size was supposed to be. I figured it could probably be small — like, we’re talking in the kilobytes here, come on, really, Drew? — and didn't bother looking it up to see if that was the case.
I downloaded it, ran it and -
My computer shut down.
Huh. That was weird. I must have done something wrong when I ran the installer. Maybe I should have... I don't know, done… something… else? How do operating system?
I turned on my computer, logged in, and before I could find my shiny new download, smooth jazz started to come out of my speakers.
My hand froze over the mouse.
I said: "What?"
Saxophone wheedled lazily through the room. Chill drums rat-tatta-tatted groovily.
I blinked.
And then my computer shut off again.
I shouted: "Daaaaad!"
There are lots of perks that come with having a father in IT. I highly recommend it.
The main perks being reliable tech support, easy access to any computer part you could need (like external hard drives to hold all of your ill-torrented gains), and... well, my desktop as a teenager was really good.
So I called him upstairs. I was panicking a little, but all things considered, I was quite calm. Dad would swoop in to save the day.
I turned on the computer for him. Jazz. It shut down. We had a laugh about it.
He said he was going to get to work on it. This was my cue to go and do something else for a little while.
Like go outside and pace for an hour.
Ah. Hm. This is an old habit of mine I used to have that bears some examination. So, uh —
Daydreaming! Also known as the section I should refer all future therapists to
So in our backyard, there was a side path. It was fairly skinny, lined with flowers on either side. It was between our house and the fence for our neighbor's lawn.
It was secluded. The only windows the path passed were for mine and my brother's bedrooms. And us, being the mole children we were, tended to keep the blinds down. There was high enough plant life on the neighbor's fence side that I never had to worry about them thinking I was a weirdo.
So what I did was pace up and down this muddy side path and just... daydream.
There were several plotlines in these daydreams. One was for a comic book I wanted to write about ninjas called “Ninja 101.” It was about this ninja team, boyfriend and girlfriend, who were super badass and did badass things. I daydreamed about levels for video games I wanted to design.
Oh, and I spent a lot of time daydreaming about what it would be like to have a girlfriend. I can assure you, these daydreams were way more innocent than you'd think for a teenage boy.
This is a habit of mine that started way back in elementary school. Fourth grade is about when I started retreating to the edges of the field during recess to pace by the fence. God, there were such epic stories with so many arcs and characters and, like any good serialized show, I’d tune in whenever it was time for a new episode.
It was so effortless, so free of ego, of trying to make it good. It was a story unfolding just for me and no one else. A story about an incredibly large number of friends who needed to coordinate across multiple timelines in order to save the universe over and over again. Sometimes there was a common enemy, sometimes the enemy was each other. There was sacrifice, impassioned speeches, overcoming grand adversity, fantastical superpowers. The characters were all from different points in time, so they needed to use a whole suite of time-traveling abilities to solve the coordinated time-attacks of their enemies.
It was really truly quite epic. I kind of wish I remembered more of it, though I suspect it’s not nearly as compelling as I’d like to think.
I miss that. I miss having somewhere outside I can go that's secluded. I miss the pacing. I miss the daydreams.
Mostly, I want the daydreams back, but there's something about the secluded outdoors and the pacing that I think facilitated the daydreams.
I have a hard time daydreaming these days.
Ah, longing for a youth when I was more creative.
Was I? I mean, “Ninja 101” was basically just smashing Dragonball Z and Naruto together.
I always look back on the way I used to be with a sense of remorse and relief. Remorse because I tend to think that I was more ___ than I am now. More creative. More confident. More social. More generous.
But also a lot of relief because I know that for whatever thing I miss about Past Drew, the fact of the matter is, I am glad to be Current Drew and with Past Drew firmly in the past. I do not miss teenage Drew's Nice Guy Complex for instance. Nor his loneliness. Nor his edgy jokes that he didn't understand made people super uncomfortable. Nor the fedora.
So anyway that's probably what I was doing while my father was hard at work trying to extract this saxophone-playing, shades-wearing, coolest-cat-in-the-lounge virus from my desktop.
My dad is a tinkerer. He loves fixing and solving problems. In his retirement, he took up jewelry-making as a hobby. He used to garden.
Actually, his big hobby these days is flying drones and taking pretty scenery videos with them.
Because we Petriello men are all children who happen to have a good work ethic.
When I came inside, the sun has started to set. I went upstairs to see Dad shaking his head.
"I can't get rid of it," he said. "You're going to need a new hard drive. Your data is fine, but you're going to need to re-install everything."
"Oh," I said. I shrugged. "That's not so bad."
"I have an extra terabyte drive in the garage. You’ve got to be more careful online. Check where you’re downloading from.”
"I know," I looked away and shiftily shifted back and forth.
And then he replaced my hard drive and all was good. No more smooth jazz. No more shutting down after one minute.
No real repercussions came from my dumbshitness. My dad was out a hard drive, but he had so many laying around that it hardly mattered.
Well, I guess the real repercussion was that I no longer pirated anything.
And he was a well-behaved boy for the rest of his life the end.
Back in my dorm, laying in my bed and reflecting on the jazz virus incident, a thought occurred to me.
I went to the top of the parking structure. It was a weekend afternoon and no one was there.
I paced and I daydreamed.
I daydreamed about a story long forgotten about a team of friends who needed to save the universe again. They needed to coordinate across multiple interweaving timelines to save everyone… and themselves.