Crash and Burn

I turn on my laptop. Then I insert the 3G stick into the USB port so I can access internet. I’m happily working on writing the first chapter to my research thesis. Then, this yellow triangle with an exclamation point in the center appears on screen. It is telling me that it can’t find something. Frankly, it didn’t seem to have anything to do with what I wanted to do, so I delete it. It comes back up. I cancel. It comes back up, I delete. Repeat.

It’s a bit of a blur from there. That yellow triangular thingy keeps popping up. Some window pops up in the corner saying something about a security threat- although it didn’t use Bush’s color scheme of yellow, orange or red so I suppose I was confused about the level of threat. At some point a very serious-looking box pops on screen and says the computer is going to shut down. I emphatically hit cancel.

At this point, I know I’ve been beaten. I frantically try to save what I was working on, preferably on a jump drive. I hit cancel every time it threatens to shut down. It is very slow to respond to my attempts to bring up the Word document and hit “save as”. Each time I get a bit farther in trying to save the document. But the cursor responds more erratically and I am seriously offending this computer by not letting it shut down. I finally hit save and hope it is not destroyed by whatever has infiltrated my computer.

It is totally crashed. The only fortunate thing is that it only affected my ability to access internet. My documents are saved; but my access to the rest of the world has been seriously compromised.