Last night, just as I was starting to think this few days of sobriety was doing me well, I made one of the biggest, most stupidest mistakes ever. I think I’ll be OK but a few days of bullshit are in order.
I should be embarrassed to admit this, but of the people I know for sure who read this it should be a secret safe. I only care for reasons of decorum.
I was having trouble using Yahoo’s SMTP server to send mail from Alpine, the latest iteration of the PINE e-mail client. I’ve used Pine and Alpine since forever, but found when I switched my web server over to OVH that many of the bigger email services flagged everything from me as spam, I guess on account of all the shit that emanates from the OVH network. I will have to explore other options (domain name keys? getting my IP off the blacklist?) but for now I had simply used yahoo’s SMTP server, which is a Plus feature for which I pay $20 a year. That $20 also covers advertising-free mail, unlimited storage, disposable addresses (which I have set up for gits and shiggles but don’t think I’ve ever used).
Thinking that a company like Yahoo must have telephone support for paying customers I spotted a number in a Yahoo support forum. The number appeared throughout Yahoo’s support forums, and I thought it looked legitimate enough. Next thing I knew I was on the phone to India with someone who, it took me a while to figure out, was not with Yahoo. I made a fucking fool of myself by allowing him to install an applet that allowed him to take over my computer, but to be honest I really think he did anything lastingly malicious. The applet he installed appears to be from a legitimate source, and the only substantive command I saw him run was “netstat”. I didn’t see antivirus software being disabled, though I admit i wasn’t glued to the PC this whole time as I should have been. The end run of this encounter was that he tried to race me through purchasing some magical anti virus that would rid me of something that was not possibly causing the problem, because after all the Alpine program runs on my dedicated web server, which is not connected to my home network in any way. He was clicking through the web browser to get me to PayPal, where login/password autocomplete would probably have let him get all the way through, except that I turned off the PC and unplugged the Internet. My phone rang several times showing a number from Florida, and a few voicemails of several minutes of background sounds sounded l like I was hearing voices of the dudes I’d been hearing for the preceding 10-15 minutes.
I know what kept me connected to this scam for far too long. I thought: this is a tech support guy. he’s going to try every wrong solution before either getting to the right one or admitting defeat. I also think that the fact that I initiated the contact gave me a little more confidence. Had this call come from them I would have hung up pronto.
More details about the whole sorry encounter are not worth sharing. I am now running one of what will be a battery of antivirus and malware scans on the non-connected PC, which would be a very bad thing for me to lose access to. I don’t really think these guys are going for the jugular, though maybe that’s just wishful thinking. I think they were just looking to clear out my PayPal account, which had about $1000 in it (not any more, as I transferred most of it out this a.m.). They might have reached that account if I hadn’t pressed the power button on the PC, shutting it off.
I come away from this thinking that I am more of a dumbass than i realized. It confirms my belief that I need to find a livelihood and a lifestyle that does not include technology or continuous pipelines of communication.
I was thinking earlier, after being stood up by a standing date via last-minute text message (after I had spent 40 minutes walking there in today’s wind and rain) that I miss the days of waiting for e-mail and chat room conversations to take place at the end of the day, at home, and not on the subway train or while crossing an intersection on a very windy, rainy day. Times change, though, and this is the world we’ve got. Last time this person stood me up I showed some patience. This time i did not even respond to the text saying “Sorry, can’t make it.”
…
I dropped out of Facebook again, this time for what I hope is an indefinite period of not looking back, except to maintain my fan pages. I stayed away from FB for exactly 6 months for certain reasons. I managed to reconnect with one of the handful of people I wanted to stay in touch with, and for whom I either had no contact info aside from Facebook. I don’t know if I got through to those for whom people essentially do not exist outside the ecosystem of the Facebook gossip market. If I unwittingly reactivate then I guess that’s how it’s going to be. I did just that a couple of times and quickly realized it but there seems to have been a third time I reactivated and I have no idea how. Or maybe deactivating just doesn’t work the way I think it does. Who the fuck cares. I have to get home and see what malware awaits me.
As this unfolded late last night I really wanted a drink. But I abstained. Hoping to do so again.
