AND NEAR-FUTURE APOCALYPTIC FIRE @ lindalzern.com
“Sherwood?” I asked. I thought
I detected an eyeroll from my husband of forty plus years, but it was hard to
tell. The weirdo lights from his fifteen computer screens have a strobing
effect.
“Yes?” He answered a question
with a question.
“You know how I’m going to the
Space Coast Book Lovers extravaganza this coming summer, and they wanted to
publish my website link, and I sent the link to them, but then when I checked the
link to see if the link actually linked to stuff and it went to a strange
website with wild Chinese writing and girls in boxes?”
“Don’t click on anything.” He
had not looked up from the strobing effect of his wall of computer screens.
“Sherwood?”
“Yes?”
“I may have clicked on
something.”
His next question sounded like
a groan. “Whhhhy?”
“Because the girls were hard to
see in their little boxes, and I couldn’t quite figure out what was going on,
what with the absence of anything I could recognize, understand, or read. So .
. . could you?” I flashed my best smile and batted my longest eyelashes.
He tapped and tapped and
tapped; computer lights flickered and snapped, but in the end he took on the
hijackers. My husband is a computer analyst of the engineering variety, called
on by nations, kindreds, tongues, and peoples to wrangle their wiliest computer
ills. He agreed to track down the bad guys and try to sort out my website
trouble. He’s an expert, and the one and only member of my IT staff. It took
him three weeks, seventy-five phone calls, one hundred and eleven billable
hours, and a bottle of extra strength Excedrin.
In the end, Hong Kong
hijackers? One website.
Us? Two new websites:
lindalzern.net & 16Toadstonelane.com
What I’ve learned from the
whole stolen website ordeal. Be Disney. Disney defends its intellectual
properties and copyrights like a tigress protecting her cubs. Their legal team
will go into a children’s daycare and make them paint over their Mickey Mouse
mural.
I get it. If you don’t, you turn
your back and the next thing you know your clever little website name, which is
partly your name, is a porn site in Hong Kong.
Sigh. Important to note that I
couldn’t have figured it out alone, not without going mad and running down
Kissimmee Park Road tearing at my hair and wearing a ragged evening gown.
Thanks, IT staff, our neighbors are grateful.
But I do worry about the high
cost of beating back the robbers and thieves and social media bots. The time,
the energy, the grief that is involved with trying to track down and straighten
out the tangled web woven by the unethical and the dishonest is exhausting.
Double sigh.
I guess I liked the world
better when more people were worried about going to hell for breaking one of
those handy ten commandments. Thou shalt not make life miserable for everyone
else. Just saying.
Linda (Catch Them if You Can)
Zern
