They’re coming in thick and fast today. I had particular success with a call I took earlier.

But I was in no mood to go through that whole thing again. Not so soon after the last one.  Read on to see how it went:

The events:

  • The caller was an Indian-accented woman on a really bad phone line.
  • This time the spiel was that viruses got into my computer and multiplied many many times creating many small files and that caused corruption. Again, my machine was sending out messages, though this time it seemed these were not cries to help to Microsoft but rather malicious spam.
  • She said she was going to show my CLSID on my PC, presumably to “prove” she wasn’t a scammer. She said CLSID was an acronym for something… it started with “computer” and sounded all very official. Whereas really it’s just short for Class ID and has to do with COM objects. (Though COM objects harbour evil in their hearts they are not merciless replicating spam-bots. They’re into much more sophisticated evil.)
  • I said, voice dripping with sarcasm, that I was very thankful for her personally ringing to call me about this. She didn’t understand the tone of voice. They never do. :(
  • I politely asked if I might ask a question. Was she going to use Assoc at the command line to determine my “CLSID”? She answered plainly… “Yes”.
  • I politely asked if she was going to show me errors in the Event Viewer as proof of my machine’s problems? She answered plainly again… “Yes”.
  • I told her that I must be psychic to have known these things. She hung up.

If I’m feeling impatient, next time I’m going to wait until they ask me if my computer is on. I’ll say, “which one, Mac or Linux?”

Or, if anyone is actually out there, what do you suggest I do next time they call?