It;s been another day in the doldrums of ennui. I’m not depressed, or even sad. I haven;t gotten to that stage yet. But I am beginning to miss school, which is a good sign that said stage is not too far away.

Then again, Ross arrives either Thursday night or Friday morning, and then I will be busy with him a lot of the time. And part of my mind insists that there are things I “should” be doing, and for the most part, there is not.

The only thing I should be doing is cleaning my room, and I am, in a fashion, working on it. Anxiety has attached to that task for me and I have decided to simply let the cycle of anxiety, avoidance, reconciliation, and resolution to get the damned thing done play itself out ion my psyche, unmolested, in hopes of having it over with sooner.

Trying to force things only adds energy to the system, which in turn pumps up the anxiety level and makes the blockage all the more painful, and hence, makes me even more avoidant. At the right moment, when the energy is aligned, I might be able to overcome the blockage by sheer force of will, but until that moment comes, I wait, and I watch.

It’s amazing how rapidly I panic. It’s like panic is never more than a step and a half away, waiting for the slightest opening to gun me from zero to freakout in 0.2 seconds. On a bad day, I panic over completely every day things, like the four seconds or so the screen goes blank when my computer is booting up. Happens every time, but now, because of difficulties I had yesterday, I panic and think the computer is broken.

Ah, yesterday. I should commit that to “paper”.

It began when I accidentally rebooted my computer. This happens a lot because all you have to do is touch the power cable and the damn thing loses power for a moment, and then, reboot city.

When it booted up again, everything was fine for a little while. All my programs were loading and everything was normal. But then, this message pops up telling me that Win 10 couldn’t complete an update and it needs me to input my product key.

The first thing that made me suspicious is that when I try to do so, it doesn’t allow for enough characters. My product key is 5 groups of 5 alphanumeric characters, and it only allowed 16. That makes no sense.

Then I noticed it had a “if this doesn’t work, call this tech support line” number on it, and it suddenly clicked : this was clearly a scam.

The idea would be that no matter what you inputted, it would not work, and then the victim would call the “tech support” line and some scammer would listen to the problem sympathetically and then offer to fix the problem… for a fee.

You know, “if you buy our upgraded security pack” or “I can connect you with an Internet security company that specializes in this sort or thing BEEP BOOP BEEP Hi, I am a toally different person from a very prestigious Internet security company, can I help you? ” or “I can solve this problem…. but only if you gather the four stones of the Orgatron and bring them to the Penultimate Hill before midnight!”.

You know…. typical scam stuff.

So then it became a matter of getting rid of the fucking thing because without it, I could not use my computer. And the usual tricks, like closing the program in Task Manager or using Windows key and R to open a Run window (also known as a command prompt by us old school types) did not work.

Luckily, I remembered Safe Mode. So I looked up how to boot Windows 10 in Safe Mode via my smartphone, and after a couple of methods that did not work but showed up on a whole whack of websites, I found our that all I have to do is hold shift when I select “reboot” from the Power menu and voila, the next time the machine resets, I will get an option screen that will let me boot in a variety of ways.

So I reboot in Safe Mode With Networking, and I run Malwarebyte’s anti-malware program, and it finds a ton of stuff, removes it, and I reboot.

Nope! Did not work. Screen of Doom still there.

So I reboot in Safe Mode With Networking, and I run Spybot Search and Destroy’s anti-malware program, and it finds a ton of stuff, removes it, and I reboot.

Nope! Did not work. Screen of Doom still there.

By this point I am super stressed out and panicky, sO I take a nap. It’s not a healthy way to deal with that kind of thing but it’s what I’ve got.

I get up, and sit there in Safe Mode, wanting my computer back. Then I can an idea. It’s a very simple idea, surely too simple to work, but I had to try it.

And it worked. Turns out, all I had to do was go to the menu that shows all the stuff that runs upon booting and disable the program that generated the popup. Next time I booted, no Screen of Doom.

I guess the scammers figured their marks are too stupid to know that was even a thing. Wish I could go back in time and tell myself what to do before it happened, so when it happened I wouldn’t be freaking out and making insane contingency plans involving wipe my hard drive and starting over from scratch.

Hey, some people cope with bad situations by drinking or eating. Me, I plan.

So all ended well, and I now know some more tricks to pull if something like that ever happens again. Still,  I could have done without the afternoon full of panic, self-recrimination, depression, and stress.

Makes me appreciate days like today, when I merely sleepy a lot.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.