I was out in Vegas visiting family over the holidays. Nine people out of the eleven staying at the house got a stomach virus. We all took turns spouting toxic fluids from alternating orifices. But you know what made me sicker? The host of the house welcoming me to feel free to check my e-mail from her computer with the following adage: "Good luck. We do have DSL, but good luck." OK, so I figure they have an old PC and it's slow. That happened to be true, but there was something precious going on in addition to that.

I booted up Windows, I think it was the Spirit of 76 version. I realized it was going to be a while, so I made a stop in the bathroom to make an e.-coli-infected deposit. Thanks for springing for the soft toilet paper, y'all! After 5-10 minutes, the systray finished filling up. It looked something like this.

It went on and on and on and on and on. I tried to see if the usual culprits were hiding in there; RealPlayer, QuickTime, and the usual AdWare collection. Yes, they were all in there. I tried opening the flashing RealPlayer icon, but I was interrupted about 20 times by various warnings and pointless facts about various applications. OK, screw playing 52-card pick-up, I'm checking my e-mail. Now to figure out how to get online.

I moved on to checking for a familiar desktop icon to signify how to sign on to the DSL account. Low and behold, every single ISP's icon since Prodigy was present. AOL, Sprint, Juno, Embarq (red), PeoplePC, NetZero, MSN and Embarq (green). I later learned that Embarq is also Sprint, so make that three versions. Anyway, I figured there must be a reason there were two versions of Embarq installed, so I went with that option. But red or green? I tried green. Bingo!

Huzzah! It only took ~30 minutes to get an IP address! Not bad. Then I opened Internet Explorer. 4-6 minutes later, this is pretty much what I saw.

Even worse than this screen shot, the top 1/8th of the screen was turned black and had a glowing, red, horizontal strip with a bunch of random tickers in it. UGH! I opened Add/Remove Programs with a plan... I could wipe out at least 10 pieces of Adware, check my e-mail, and if it hadn't been more than two hours, install an anti-adware app for them. Then I saw the list of applications. Three children live in the house and use the computer, and each child had about 20 kidware titles installed. Each. I saw at least 8 titles with "ABCs" in the name. I gave up.

Ironically, after another 3 minutes of waiting for Explorer to close, I looked at some of the desktop shortcuts and noticed that five of them were Spyware/Adware blockers. :)

How do people live like this? Somehow, this machine continues to boot up and serve some sort of usefulness to these people. I watched someone use Turbotax on this thing later that day. I suppose I should have had a conversation with them about the fact that they had very personal and private information stored in their Turbotax files... while a plethora of spyware, and most likely trojans, were undoubtedly sending this information to an indefinite number of various thieves throughout the globe...

But I chose to take a shit instead.