Take a Senior for a Ride!
We’re
out there, just waiting to be hooked.
Marty, my wife, and I bought a television the other
day. Then I went over to the Comcast
place to get a cable box for it. I brought it home, and then the fun
began.
Do you remember when you brought a new TV home and
plugged it in, adjusted the rabbit ears, and there was the picture? Maybe there was some climbing up on the roof
to put up an antenna, but we were young then. Watching television was not hard.
Now we have cable, with scads of channels, most of
which are filled with the deadliest of sludge. The Comcast people gave me a big
new box, a fancy-looking remote, and a lot of paper. I brought it home and then the fun
began.
The instructions were very detailed. Different choices of which box you had, which
television brand you had, a different number to program into your remote, and
maybe that number didn’t work, so try another.
On and on it went, but after each trip through the
checklist, “No signal” showed up on the television screen. I switched
components, went from downstairs to upstairs, swapped this and that, changed to
the old television, which worked. Still,
with the new combination, “no signal.”
Well, I’m 80 years old, and that means I’m probably
electronically challenged. I asked a
sharp young fellow named Alan. He tried
to help, but drew a blank.
Then another Alan, my nephew, came to help. Oh, he managed to get the television to
display all kinds of stuff, but in the end, “no signal”. He managed to get a woman from “Comcast Customer
Service”, a misnomer if there ever was one.
She marched us through a whole bunch of steps, and then the phone line
disconnected, and we knew it would be many, many minutes to get her back. So that was another blank.
Today, I thought I would try to find that woman in “Customer
Service” again. I looked up on line for “Comcast
Customer Service.”
I called this number and immediately, a man with an
Indian voice answered. That should have been my first clue that
something was wrong. Who ever heard
of “Customer Service” ever answering without many minutes of taped messages
about how much they wanted to talk with me, and how important I was to them,
and how the conversation, if it ever happened, would be taped for quality
purposes?
No, the Indian gentleman was right there, at my
service. I told him that I kept getting
a “No signal” on my television.
He started off by telling me that I would have to go
to my computer to log on, to check my “network” because, you see, this was a “Smart
TV”. That should have been my second clue.
I went down two floors to the basement, where my
desktop computer is located, and as instructed, I logged on to an obscure web
address, and then on the screen saw a box that called for some numbers. He conveniently supplied me the numbers, I
downloaded something, and soon, he was controlling my computer. Some guy in India (or Kenya or Bangla Desh,
or maybe Saugus, Massachusetts) whipping the mouse around the screen in an
impressive manner. Why travel two floors
away from the television to work on a connection? That
should have been my third clue.
It’s always exhilarating, when an Indian in
Bangalore takes your computer for a ride.
They find things in it you never knew existed!
And, boy, did this guy find stuff. He opened up my router, which sends the wi-fi
signal to three other computers in the house, and presumably to my new “Smart
TV”. He showed me squiggly waves going
up and down, as my router routed electronic signals. And then he showed me that 24 separate
computers were tapped on to my router. Yes—instead of four, there were 24. And six of them were “foreign”. Apparently six unknown, mysterious creeps in
some foreign location, were tapped on to my computer, reading my deathless emails
and Facebook entries. And God knows
where the other 14 were. “Did you give
anyone your password?” the Indian voice asked.
No, I didn’t. “Well, this is
serious, but I cannot correct it. If you
will give me permission, I will transfer you to the Cisco anti-hacking branch,
and he will help you."
“Oh,
yes!” I replied. I was thoroughly hooked
by these nice Indians, who were obviously laboring mightily to save my computer
from legions of hackers.
On
the line came Mr. Anti-hacking Cisco man, another Indian voice. He went through a few questions, and then he
told me that yes, indeed, he could clear all this up, and rid me from these
merciless hackers. For $399 for six
months, $699 for a year, and $999 for life.
That was my fourth clue. I had heard of the scams involving locking up
people’s picture files and then unlocking them for loads of bitcoins, and here
I was, being asked to spend $399 to rid my computer of unscrupulous hackers
from around the world.
I
said to the Indian Anti-hacking Cisco man, “Well, I guess I’m out of luck,
then. Thanks!” And I hung up and
disconnected my computer, hopefully to rid myself of the little parasite.
If
you read this, you likely know far more about all this than I, but I presume
that the squiggly lines that showed all the illicit tappers on my router was
all stuff that was inserted by these crooks.
And if I had given him my credit card information to rid myself of these
hackers for only $999 for life, he could have drained my card and left me hanging
out to dry.
In
the end, I still have a useless television and a useless Comcast cable box, and
tomorrow I will try once again to find if there is indeed such a thing as “Comcast
Customer Service.”
Sam Coulbourn
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