A friend mentioned that her computer crashed today. I asked her why that happened. What followed was so amazingly stupid that I'm still flabbergasted.
So, she fancies herself an artist. She wanted to get her hands on a copy of Photoshop. She asked a friend, and found out that (*gasp*) it costs money! Lots of money, in fact! Well, she won't be paying for that, no siree. You see, she can't balance her checkbook. And she and her husband couldn't save money for something if their life depended on it. So what does she do? She heads right on over to Pirate Bay to get herself a "free" copy. Soooooo, lacking any common or computer sense whatsoever, she searches for "Photoshop" and clicks on the first download that pops up.
At this point my jaw is hanging at how fucking naive she was.
So, as you've probably surmised, that's how she got some form of virus. "Well, what about your antivirus protection?" I asked. "Didn't that send up a warning signal or clean it up?"
"Oh, I don't bother with anything like that," she informed me. She had a tone that almost suggested her ignorance was something to be lauded.
"But... I... what? You can get a bunch of free, basic ones all over the place! Don't you have Comcast?! Don't they provide free Norton Anti-virus protection?" I asked.
"Yeah, I don't know about any of that."
So, she then complains about how her husband can't seem to fix her computer. He's been doing a bunch of "stuff" and it's still not fixed, she explained. Now, not once did she acknowledge how stupid she was. Not once did it dawn on her that perhaps this is a fitting batch of karma for a sloppy attempt at piracy. Nope. Just undeserved indignation that the situation couldn't be resolved by someone else.
"So do you know how to fix it? [Her husband] thinks we just have to reformat the whole hard drive. I don't want to have to do that. Isn't there some file you could just delete or something?"