Smart Friends Rock!

I know I've said it before, but it is worth repeating: it's good to have smart and talented friends. Especially ones who can fix computers after you inadvertently caused a catastrophe. First, I must back up to sometime Thursday night.

I was reviewing the trending topics at Yahoo. I always find it interesting to see what sort of "hot topics" are currently circulating, and I noticed Gisele Bundchen's name listed. Thus began the following conversation:

Me: Hmm, I wonder what Ms. Gisele is up to now?
DH: Who?
Me [thinking he didn't hear me]: Gisele Bundchen
DH: Am I supposed to know who that is?
Me: Seriously? You don't know who she is?
DH: No, I really don't.

I sat there rather agape for a moment before explaining that she used to date Leo DiCaprio, and she now either dates or is married to Tom Brady and just had his baby, and she's only one of the biggest supermodels in the world. "Oh, okay, I've never heard of her." Yes, ladies and gentlemen, there really are men out there like that! LOL End of conversation, end of story, right?

Yeah, except that DH saw her name trending again Friday afternoon. He then thought to himself, "I'm going to find a photo of her to see if I might recognize her from something." He searched for a pretty tame one, and finally clicked.

WHAM!! A trojan hit. All sorts of stuff started downloading to the computer. As DH put it, "I'm too young to have been seeing some of that stuff." He immediately disconnected the internet connection and closed the browser, but it was way too late for that. Not only was there visual filth, but we could not get any .exe files to run. "The xyz.exe file has been infected. Do you wish to run virus scanning software now?" Only it wasn't a real Windows pop-up box; it was fake. And another pop-up kept appearing at the bottom right telling us that we had a virus security risk. No kidding! Only this window wasn't real either. It was all part of the virus. But not being able to run any .exe files, we had no way to download and run anything to help, and our current virus software (which should have stopped this thing to start with, IMO!) wasn't showing any threats even when we could get it to load and run. "No threats found." Yeah, well, all these pop-ups say differently!! All because I had made some stupid comment to my husband about some model he didn't even know. AAARRRGGGHHH!!!

[Aside: I know what some of you are thinking. You're thinking that he made up the story about what site he was on and what he was doing on the web at the time, and I'm an idiot for believing the story. If you know my husband at all, you know it happened just as he said. And even if it didn't, he was SOOOO angry about what happened, that it will *never* happen again!]

He and I spent most of the afternoon off and on trying to fix it and having no luck. We went to see Iron Man 2 to get our minds off of it (too bad it wasn't as good as the first one), picked up the child, ate dinner, and put the child in bed. Then back to the laptop we went. I tweeted about the problem, and within minutes, I had two offers of help from two different corners of the country. One is an old friend who has always been a true geek, long before geeks were cool. From the day we met in high school until the year he moved away, he and I saw every Star Trek film released in theaters together. He now lives about 100 miles away, though I haven't seen him in years. He was out with his wife of just a few weeks and was checking in on Twitter when she stepped away. It was kind of him to offer, but I really didn't want to bother him while he was out, especially with her. I asked a couple of questions, but didn't take the time for specifics. I knew I could contact him later if I still needed help.

The other offer came from one of my best friends, Annette, and her husband, who both do IT for a living. DH is painfully shy, and he was very anxious about talking to her husband. "But I've never even met him!" Yeah, well, you broke it, you fix it! LOL We called up Arizona, and off we went. I'm not even sure how long we talked. Well over an hour, I do believe. Long enough to finish the Braves/Diamondbacks game we were all watching (they're Braves fans, too, so they didn't care who won; we cared!). It was funny to realize that there was about a 2 second delay between what we were seeing and what they were seeing. We passed around the phone and the computer, and I'm pretty sure we all four were working on the problem at one point. We *finally* got our security software to *see* that there was a problem and start working on it. We literally rebooted the computer around 20 times (I lost count after 12), but ever so slowly, we got it cleaned and running. No more ick, no more pop-ups, and all executable files working properly. Whew!

Thank you so much to Annette and Mike! You saved us much time, frustration, and likely money. Smart friends rock!!

Currently feeling: loving my friends