Copyright (C) 1989 T. S. Bennett. All Rights Reserved.
  
     The Search for the .ARC of the Coveted Virus
  
I tell you, I'm fed up! I just cant catch it.
    My computer and I have visited every sleazy BBS
 bathhouse we could, bent over and downloaded the suspicious
 arcs, hoping for lots of TSR's. We've been to every
 computer shooting gallery, searched through piles of grungy
 disks, grabbing the most bent-up, and most shared looking
 programs to ram into the floppy drive. I had hoped that
 someone would care enough to put a "bomb" in my main
 memory. I've injected my system with every flu shot and
 every backyard trojan horse program, in hopes that the
 authors might be those "son of sam" types who would slip a
 virus right into their very anti-viral bitstream.
    Frequent checkups haven't shown anything out of the
 ordinary in my Command.com. The most exciting thing that
 happened was two disk read errors on the same day last
 week. I was overjoyed, I thought we had been running a
 fever, but when "Read Error" flashed on the screen, I just
 about died!
    I called ahead to the Micro hospital and tried to make
 an appointment for my other half to get a full going
 through with special emphasis on getting the lumps of
 cholesterol pried out from between its FAT tables. They
 said," We're full up, due to the recent virus scare, and
 we're making money hand over fist with our computer-aids
 hospice program. It's all covered by self employment
 insurance you know! So, unless your modem has actually
 croaked from running too much Kermit, or your FAT tables
 have turned into pork rinds, we dont have the time."
    I was so tired of answering "personal ads" with my
 personal computer, that I said,"to hell with this safe
 computer sex campaign. I've got to have that real modem
 feel!" I wanted to be exposed to a lot more risk because of
 direct, (modem to modem, binary files and all that)
 contact.
    I thought I should get "professional" help by joining
 one of those nationwide franchised BBSer networks. I'd had
 enough of this local "massage-parlor-mentality". The
 "Global" net allowed more room for expansion, and less
 chance for tracing the source of my hypothetical infection,
 and that was great, cause when I was worn out from booting
 it myself, I had a friend boot it for me by phone, long-
 distance! I looked at it like a kind of health club, where
 I could go to get my files pumped up.
      Well, got to go now, I hear my data line ringing, I'm
 going to monitor the screen, it could be that long awaited
 call giving my computer an incurable disease, and making me
 "somebody".