My family’s first venture into the world of high speed internet...
....has been nothing short of a disaster.
Believe it or not, until this last week, I have accessing the realm of cyberspace with a pokey 56K dial-up connection, much to the chagrin of many of my friends. The occasional offers to send me pictures or videos were always quickly and dismissively rejected as I feared it would take days to download them. “You mean, people STILL use dial-up?” they would exclaim in genuine surprise (MCACers, doesn’t this sound like a certain Aussie we all know?). No people, dial-up has not gone the way of the dinosaur. Soon, but not yet.
When we finally decided to make the splurge and go high speed (I suspect offering to split the monthly fee with my parents had something to do with it) I was pretty excited. No more having to avoid flash websites, goodbye to tying up the phone line and a hearty adieu to waiting for what seemed like forever and a day for large e-mails to download. At last, we were catching up to the rest of the cyber-world. It was only the installation process that was holding us back from high-speed heaven.
Now, if you’ve been a faithful reader of my blog for some time, you’ll notice that a lot of seemingly ordinary things in my life seldomly go as swimmingly as they should.
For starters, we didn’t receive enough phone filters, and my father, wrongly assuming that my phone was not in constant use didn’t install one for my room. So you can imagine my shock when I tried to make a phone call that one day, and had my eardrums nearly pierced right through with a series of intermittent high-pitched whirring and beeps. Sympatico then continued to demonstrate their stellar service to our household by sending us the wrong cables in the installation kit. Maybe they had double-teamed with Future Shop too, because later on in the ordeal, the sales guy there sold my dad the wrong cables for the router.
So finally, two weeks after initially receiving the installation kit, we had amassed all the necessary hardware and were ready to go on-line. Only, it appeared that our phone line had some sort of error. Error? I was able to make phone calls, was I not? We had used slow pokey dial-up for years, hadn’t we? Was our phone line too old for our brand new modem’s liking or something? Was Sympatico going to tell us that we needed to get a new computer too? Well, whatever it was, they fixed it 2 days later.
Several days later as I was browsing online, I said casually to my father, "Hey Dad, so what kind of firewall are we using?"
"Uh...yes...well...can you download one and install it?" was his reply. I've never liked those question-to-answer-a-question responses and I certainly didn't like it now.
"You mean we've been going online without a firewall?!?" I exclaimed, suddenly feeling very vulnerable, as if I wandered into a shooting range with a huge bull’s-eye painted on my back. My worries were justified - half an hour later I discovered we had a virus - some sort of worm that had either already existed in our system or that had somehow infected our computer during our several days of defenceless surfing. (Did I also mention that we didn't updated our antivirus software in ages? Somehow I thought my dad had always taken care of it and he always thought that I would do it - communication is key, people. I should have learned my lesson last fall when I inadvertently double-booked myself one weekend for a camping trip and a wedding because I had assumed the wedding was on Labor Day weekend. It’s a long story.)
Anyway, within hours, one of our computers was rendered nearly useless, despite running a new antivirus software. My level of paranoia had hit the roof. As I passed by my brother's room the following day I asked him if the firewall was running on his profile on the computer in there. “What? Uh, I don’t know,” he answered.
I stopped in my tracks, took a deep breath and said slowly, “Sam, is there an icon in the taskbar that you’ve never seen before? It’s for the firewall…it’s called Freedom.”
He looked and replied, “Nope.”
I reacted. In one quick motion I swept into his room, vaulted over his chair, shoved him out of the way and logged him off. “What do you mean…I can’t believe you’re…why in the…AAGH!” I was unable to make complete phrases in my disbelief and frustration.
So my family’s just a little bit on edge these days. We’re going to have to reformat both computers because it appears our other computer has been infected too, through our home network connection.
And, in the meantime, since it appears I have no other choice, I’m just going to have to surf at work.
