Most of us learn that mom's have eyes in the back of their heads at an early age. As children we can usually not quite figure out how moms know so much. As we get older our moms get incredibly stupid, but that's another story.
Anyway, my cutie pie, newly turned 10 year old son decided to get curious Wed. and check out sites he isn't allowed to check out. Guess what? Mom found out because all kinds of "System Security" stuff started appearing all over the computer, the computer that we just got connected to the Internet the day before. We questioned the kids to see who had been on the computer and a very guilty and scared little boy admitted to it. Slowly over about a 10 minute time period my cutie pie confessed to pulling up sites he shouldn't have been on. We talked to him and I said I would fix it but next time he would be grounded from the computer if he went on sites he knew he wasn't allowed to go on. We reminded him that mom has ways of finding out where they've been on the computer.
Quite confident in my computer knowledge I thought something bad had entered the computer so I ran a virus scan and was going to get rid of whatever it was. Wow! Was I ever wrong! The problem just kept getting worse. The "System Security" turned out to be a virus that my cutie pie authorized to enter our computer by simply clicking "YES" to a pop up and by telling our real security system that it was okay for it to enter. To make a long story short, we lost all connection to the Internet and my virus scanner couldn't pick up the virus. It cost us $9.75 to talk to a person from McAfee to get the number to priority technical support. It cost us another $89.95 to talk to and turn complete control of our computer over to a very nice lady from McAfee who fixed our computer in about a 1/2 hours time. I can't believe how expensive it was to fix the computer and with money that we didn't have! There is no way I could have fixed it myself though and so we paid the price.
Lessons Learned:
- Inform kids NOT to push yes to anything on the computer without asking mom first.
- Check into parental controls for the computer.
- and the hardest lesson for me is to NOT think my baby is as Innocent as I thought he was. I'm not ready for prepuberity to start. I've gone through it with 4 boys and 1 girl already and I AM NOT READY FOR IT TO HAPPEN AGAIN, not yet anyway!!!!
- and the lesson for the kids is to NEVER, EVER forget that mom does have eyes in the back of her head and you will get caught at what you do. Maybe not right away, but eventually, you will get caught!
7 comments:
Wow!! That was a good lesson learned by all. Too bad it was so expensive. I can't imagine how you would control kids on the internet. It just seems like such a garganutan task.
Sherry, I wish we had known. Steve might have been able to walk you through it. Cathy
Hi Sherry
Glad to hear you got it sorted out in the end. I will tell my daughter about the pop ups so hopefully it won't happen to us.
Thanks for the warning.
Have a good weekend.
Lindsay
oh dear- that's an expensive lesson! Whew!
Do you log on manually or is it pre- set and you just get access right away? You may want to manually log in EVERY time. Even if YOU have to do it to allow them access to the computer. I don't trust my daughter so I manually log in every time. It is worth it! Hopefully you don't have anymore problems!
Hugs You!!!
It's not funny but I think back of a similar incident when you were young. I opened the phone bill one day to discover several pages of long distance phone calls. I immediately called the phone company to tell them there was an error. Well, it turned out that you and Mike had been dialing 1-2-3 on the phone and it got charged every time you did it. The phone company was tired of children playing with the "real" phone. Lots of lessons learned and warnings given. All things come back to haunt us (smile). Love you, Mom
Sherry:
I wish you had said something, my husband is a computer technician, he may have been able to help. prepuberty, uh oh!
this sounds like me...I HAVE grown CHILDREN and two still at home...13 and 11...I am NOT ready for all this either...I think it is harder when you know what can be coming..notice I am not confessing it will come!hahaha
God Bless
Kandy
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