Sleepwalk With Me_ And Other Painfully True Stories - Mike Birbiglia [21]
MOM:
It says here, “I cannot find the disk drive!”
ME:
What? Where does it say that?
MOM:
In huge black letters.
ME:
On the desktop? On the computer screen?
MOM:
It’s written right here on this Post-it note. Your father wrote it, and he stuck it to the desk, so I guess it’s on the desktop, yes.
Again, I know very little about computers. I know how to create Word documents and surf the net. I had no idea how much I knew about computers until I met my parents.
Learning about email has been the big step for my folks. My mom’s got a few of those friends who forward everything. And it’s okay when you get the email with the fifty cutest puppy pictures of all time, but when your mom forwards you emails like “Pepper is poison and other things the government doesn’t want you to know,” you gotta step in and be like, “Mom, you gotta tell your friend Martha that pepper is not poison.”
For a while, my parents thought every email was written directly to them. They were a spammer’s dream. One day my mom said, “My friend Elizabeth at USAirways.com says I’ll get five hundred bonus miles if I send FTD flowers through USAirways.com.”
“Mom, who’s Elizabeth at US Airways?”
“Elizabeth, she sends me emails with special deals from US Airways. I think she’s the vice president of marketing.”
“And how do you know her?”
“We email each other.”
The computer virus was a really difficult concept for my dad to take in. I think because he’s a doctor and he knows about real viruses. I remember him asking me, “But where do these viruses come from?”
And I answered as best I could. I said, “I don’t know, some crazy hackers in Malaysia write these programs that travel around the world, infecting millions of computers.”
And he had this facial expression I’ll never forget, like he was confused and sad and furious all at the same time. And he said, “But why?”
It was kind of like a fourth grader asking why there are wars.
“Trust us, kid. It makes sense.”
One of the few things I know about computers is that you should never open attachments that you receive from strangers. My parents did not receive that information. They just click on every email attachment they get. They’re like, “We’ve got mail! Who is it from? XRXRzebars@monkeys.tv! A new friend!”
MJ and Vince ended up with a porn virus that was so nasty it took over their entire computer. The wallpaper, the screensaver. The icons became dildos. A strange man jumped onto the screen and shouted, “Where’s your daughter?”
My parents were very saddened by this, because when they picked up their computer at Circuit City, they had not thought this was one of the possibilities.
So my Mom called me into the living room and she couldn’t bring herself to tell me about the virus specifically. She was like, “Michael, something happened with the computer.”
And I’ve seen some porn in my time. Some accidentally, some not so accidentally, but this was some really hard-core, truck-stop-style porn. And I’ve had some bad gigs before, but it must be really degrading if you work in porn and the only work you can get is being featured in a computer virus. And you go to the mall, and some guy sees you, and he asks, “Where have I seen you before?”
And you have to ask him, “Has your computer ever been infected with the ‘me_love_u_long_time_nude_sex’ virus? Because I’m on the twenty-third pop-up window having a threesome with two bald clowns. You can’t miss me.”
The porn virus made things very tense in the Birbiglia household that week. It seemed like MJ and Vince were suspicious of one another—that the other person had ordered this rapid-fire pop-up porn service for the computer. They were double-checking credit card statements. I wouldn’t be surprised if MJ shot an email to her friend Elizabeth at USAirways to ask her if this had happened to her too.
It was also particularly awkward because I had never even talked to my parents about sex, never mind my porn preferences. The closest my dad ever came to bringing up sex was when