I Fought Technology and Won (for Now)
Microsoft, in its great wisdom, pushed an update in the middle of night last week. The only clue that I had about it was a “reminder” to reboot. There was also a caveat that the restart would take “several minutes” and “Do not turn the computer off” and “The computer may stop and start several times.”

After glancing through all the mail that had accumulated overnight, I sighed, and hit “Restart”, going off to take my shower and dress for the day. 45 minutes later, I returned to the computer and it was still grinding away, doing whatever it was supposed to.

After breakfast, I returned to my desk to find the computer waiting for me, with a note that one of the services failed to start. I checked everything and it seemed fine to me, so I went on about my business.

In my junk mail that morning were two messages threatening me with destruction of everything unless I paid $500 in ransom. The notes said they knew my password. The password they told me was one I used in the past, but hadn’t used in years.

Cyber crime is a real thing and, of course, I panicked.

I ran a new virus scan.

I went through my password list and changed my password for any sites that had used the “stolen” one in the past.

I tried to access the server to see if everything was still there…and I couldn’t reach it.

I called my second-born son who assured me I would be fine. He said the threats were probably phishing from one of the data breaches that seem to be happening all the time.

But still I worried.

What about that message that said all my services weren’t running?

Was the service really one of the programs that was supposed to protect me?

Was it a virus scan that quit running?

Then that night, the computer didn’t back up as scheduled.

I was almost hysterical thinking that all the old photos I had carefully scanned to the server would be infected, or worse, lost forever.

Two days later, I again called my son and almost wept, worrying about my files, bank records, photos, and basically the whole history of my digital life.

Long story short, he was able to fix it, remotely, and it is now chugging along just fine.

And I had the first good night’s sleep in a week.
['Abbie Watters']
['Flash Fiction', 'Conflict', 'Technology']