420 Summit

Quarantined

This hasn’t been my most productive week.

Early on, one of the kids — yeah, I know who you are and don’t think that because I can’t prove it you won’t suffer — decided to circumvent every last bit of security on our home network. Ports, all of them, were opened. Firewalls were disabled and anti-virus software managed to accidentally get removed. Just to round things out one of them decided to do me a favor and ‘tweak’ the router. Because, you know, latency is much more a concern to me, a guy who runs Photoshop and sends email, than it is to… say, a kid playing first person shooters.

It took me a day to notice and by that time every single machine on the network had slowed to a crawl. Two of them were running out of memory before a single program could be launched and another went right to a kernel dump. This was not a great deal of fun to repair and the little darlings can spend a week or two trying to guess passwords and begging.

The second infestation was easier, though much more expensive, to fix.

The kids, especially the girls, share everything. They sleep over each others houses; sharing beds, blankets, clothes and brushes. I’ve seen three of them camp for a weekend with a single toothbrush between them. It’s cute and all — until the school sends home the bi-annual head lice notice.

Bedding (all of it), clothes, car upholstery, sofas, towels — all of it has to be disinfected. This involves lengthy and expensive trips to laundromats, dry cleaners, and pharmacists. Not to mention hours of online chat, texting and phone calls while they try to track down the poor little kid that started it all. Bunch of Nancy Drew’s, all looking to place the blame anywhere but themselves.

Yeah, it was a fun week.