Week 33 of hell for a Mac user working in XP purgatory. The last seven days have been mainly trojan time, along with forgetting the Windows password on a seldom-used but important PC.

There’s a certain tone to the voices as they shout my name down the corridor. One knows instinctively it’s because “something” is wrong with their computer. Usually I find a screen full of dialogue boxes stating “something” dire has happened, and the whole thing needs throwing in the dustbin. That is my usual suggested solution. After all, I am employed for my skills and judgements, not to fix PCs.

On Thursday, somehow one of my colleagues had picked up a nasty dose of “something” while innocently looking up a recipe. This was from the same Web site I had found for her with my Mac at home via LogMeIn from my work PC. My Mac browsed with no problem, but my colleague’s computer’s built-in XP security went into hyper-stupidity and kept throwing up warnings and dread announcements of what would happen if she didn’t click on the Accept button. Only to throw up another similar warning when she did. Why is Windows so stupidly and uselessly super-helpfully unhelpful?

It took a rigid digit on the restart button to correct the situation. This is not easy for me since breaking my index finger on the last day of my recent foray into France. Then I booted the infected PC as an administrator to delete the nasties infecting the machine. Goodness knows why the computer’s usual operator doesn’t have the privileges to delete the files. She was out visiting a client, so I couldn’t get back her lost work because I didn’t know her password.