I’ve been scouring the job searches and postings looking for employment for what seems like forever now. I’ve had horrid luck in that department too and I couldn’t fathom why I would possibly be turned down with comments like “you don’t possess the qualities we’re looking for” and similar given to me. Well, at long last, the answer was revealed. I mistakenly left a woman who has bad relations with my mother as a reference and she’s been happily bad mouthing me. Joy. I caught that though (finally!) and fixed my resume, I’ve been earning a little more money on side jobs and small design gigs too so I thought things were looking up for me.

Then, last night, while I was doing updates on the laptop and commenting on blogs my computer got attacked by multiple viruses all at once. Seriously, Avira was blocking attacks back to back, think there was like eight. I thought they got blocked but something clearly went through because, alas, the blue screen of death appeared a few minutes later and then the computer shut down. When I brought it back up it said that the RUN.dll wasn’t working. I did a restore to a previous backup point, and that fixed that problem, but then Windows itself said it wasn’t working. And then there was a new program installed on my computer that I never downloaded let alone installed.

The program that installed itself was called something like 2010 Internet Security, it downloaded and installed itself. It said I had 20+ viruses, worms, and trojans on my computer and wanted me to pay $49.99 to get the paid version and remove the threats. Poor Avira Antivirus was going crazy trying to block the fucker as it did it’s “scan” too. I tried to go to the control panel and uninstall the 2010 Internet Security thing from the programs list, well guess what, it wasn’t even there.

I suspect the thing downloaded and installed itself when a popup loaded earlier that day. I was on someone’s site, can’t remember who, and got bombarded with popups. One of which said something along the lines of “your computer may be infected, do a scan with…” and when I tried to close that window an alert message came up asking me if I was sure I wanted to close the window, but instead of having an “ok” and “cancel” button it just had the “cancel” button. In other words, you couldn’t close the popup. I ended up having to ctrl + alt + delete and close out Firefox entirely.

That event, coupled with the Weather Channel plugin that would never uninstall no matter how many times you “uninstalled” it, clued me in that something was going on somewhere. So I started checking to make sure Spybot, Malwarebytes Anti-Malware, Adaware, and Avira Antivirus were all up to date and was about to do scans, when BAM!, blue screen of death and the laptop shut down. Then of course, when I brought it back up, there was the RUN.dll error, then the restore, and then the “Windows has encountered an error and shut down” and from there nothing works. And in the mean time, that stupid program that downloaded itself was running in the background doing scans and telling me I have some worm that could potentially steal my information.

Uh, yeah, you’re the worm you sorry sack of monkey-spunk! And of course this all happens when I’ve got a ton of work to do too. I didn’t get a wink of sleep last night and now I’ve got dark circles under my eyes. I must look something awful since the cashier at Staples was looking at me like I might reach over the counter and attack her. Honestly, I was in a fair mood too sense I was able to catch an 8gb Sandisk flash drive on sale for $14.99. It was a sale that I couldn’t pass up, even with the impending computer repair expense.

My laptop crashed before and I took it to PC Fix and was really impressed with how fast they got it fixed, how cheap it was, and that they were able to do data recovery and it didn’t cost an arm and a leg for that as well. I’ll be taking my laptop to them this time too. Alas, they’re closed on the weekends so the earliest I can take it in to them is Monday, assuming they’re not closed in observance of President’s Day. They are a small locally owned business after all and they are in Las Cruces, the town that seems to shut down on every holiday. Hopefully they can get it up and running that same day like they did last time.

In the mean time, I’m gonna be MIA for a bit. As it is, I had to borrow the computer at my Mom’s office to make this post. So yeah, I’ll be slow answering emails and returning comments for the next few days as I get this straightened out and then play catch up.