Aside #24: Mr. Apple -- Get rid of creepy WOTD!

May 2012

I haven't posted an Aside for awhile.  Blame Mr. Apple for causing me a mini-meltdown.  Let me explain....

Last Saturday started out fine. 

Husband was away in BC visiting his daughter, her partner, and the new exceptionally cute dog! so I was on my own.  

As per the usual Saturday routine, I cleaned a bit, hit the gym for an aerobics class, shopped at the local health food store for dinner, and then settled down (with kitties) to stretch and enjoy a 'five-hanky' movie on the Women's Network TV.  My idea of a perfectly blissful day.

Ever the multi-tasker, as I was crying over Marley & Me  (***spoiler alert... the dog dies of old age***), I was also looking at books and surfing on my Mac laptop reading local media stories about a 'pervert' in the area molesting women.  I noticed that a copycat? pervert had entered a woman's house very near ours in the middle of the night, groped her, fled, and was caught just a few blocks away.  This of course prompted me to double lock the doors and to instruct the 3 cats snoozing on the couch with me to take shifts on watch duty. 

Hmm... Not.

At one point, I put aside the laptop to watch the end of the movie.  Minutes passed and the hankies piled up around me.  When I next looked at the idle laptop, I was transfixed by words floating eerily across the screen... Biblical'... 'Liturgical' ... 'Evangelist' ...  

As I watched, shocked, the words faded away into the background, to be replaced by the following message: "Satanism":  Press the D key to see more".

Freaked-out doesn't begin to describe my reaction.  It's midnight. I'm alone. I'm watching sobby movies and I'm brooding about weirdos in the area. Staring at the screen, I got a rush of ex-Roman Catholic fire and brimstone nightmares, jumbled up with scenes from The Omen and The Exorcist.  I felt invaded and violated by some malevolent cyber creep that was somehow watching me from my laptop.  

I immediately shut the laptop down and texted Husband and a close friend, both of whom are wayyyy more proficient with the technical side of computers than I am.  Both responded immediately to say they haven't heard of this before and agreed it was weird.  I went to bed and slept restlessly.  The cats, however, slept fine.

Next morning, my friend came over, carrying print with various cleaning programs we could run to turf the supposed virus lurking deep in the Mac heart. 

But first my friend looked at my sreen savers, scrolling through System Preferences, Desktop & Screen Saver, and then a list of Screen Savers (Flurry, Abstract, Cosmos, Forest and then.... wait .... Word of the Day). 

I quickly changed it off WOTD and ..... problem solved.   

Word of the Day.  Not even sure how it became the Screen Saver.  I don't remember choosing it.  But beyond that, what creepy Apple mind chooses words like 'Satanism' in this cyber-attack-infiltrated world? And what cosmic coincidence caused those words to flash across my laptop when I was alone and at my most vulnerable?  Grrrrr....

Mr. Apple, you need to edit the Word of the Day program and get rid of the sick humour.  I don't need that level of STRESS!