What is bugging me?

Hello all you computrons,

The other day at work I was minding my own business when tragedy struck me. I was looking around on the Internet, yeah I think you have heard of it, when the virus protection software stepped up a notch. It alerted me that it found a virus and deleted it.

I thought to myself that is weird. So I went and ran a virus scan. It was running and doing its thing. It did not find anything out of the ordinary that I saw. So I thought I would defragment my computer was I was trying to be proactive. When into the blue the icons on my desktop disappeared. I thought to myself this is strange. So I shut down my computer. Then boot it back up. The icons appear only to disappear again. I try to sign into my work e-mail account. It lets me sign in only to kick me out. I try to get online, but it blocks me giving me some kind of error message. I keep getting error messages at every task I am trying to perform.

So I go the way of tech support and call our IT department. An hour later one of the gadget gurus comes down to see what can be done. He fiddles around and sees I have a root virus. This is apparently a rough one because it takes hold of the computer and uses your files to replicate itself. He was deleting programs trying to take away its foothold, but it was still hanging on and replicating itself. This root virus would take control before the virus protection program could kick in. He would delete where the root virus was and it would pop up again.

After trying to get rid of my not so friendly new friend on my system, he tried on two other systems. However, it already infected my computer. That is right you people in the know, my computer had to be wiped and completely reinstalled. Everything must go! After several hours I am the proud possessor of an old machine with new updates. So far it has not given me any problems, I hope it stays that way.

I have no idea how I received this bug. The IT guy thinks it was through an e-mail or website. Those of course are the common ways of the sneak attack. I do not think I opened any bizarre e-mails lately. The only site I went to that I had not gone to before and the virus protection site warned me about was...our very own town's website. Maybe I should write them and ask them to refund my property tax for the angst and distress they caused me.

Keep surfing, but watch out for the crashing waves.