An hour before my deadline and my notebook just wouldn’t boot. Not from the hard drive, not from an old, Windows 98 boot disk (true, the notebook lacked a floppy drive), and not from the Restore CD. That’s right; it wouldn’t even save itself by destroying my data.

I was trapped. I was a goner. How could things possibly get worse?

You guessed it. My neighbor, Norman. You remember Norman, don’t you? President, Product Manager, and Plumbing Engineer for Softpopsoftwaredotcom.com.

“Hi, Lincoln. Got a few minutes to see our latest offerings?”

I looked at the inert notebook. There was nothing I could do about that deadline. Maybe if I ignored it for awhile, the problem would just go away —like the national debt. “Yeah, okay,” I said.

He placed his notebook on the desk and booted up. It sprang to life instantly as I fought back my jealousy.

“I’ve got a new line of security products and maintenance utilities,” he explained. “The flagship program is Norman AntiVirus. Now, what do people want in an antivirus program?”

“No viruses,” I offered.

“Good point. Norman AntiVirus comes with a guarantee that it contains no viruses, trojan horses, spyware, or phish.”

“What about adware?” I asked.

“Just information on our other wonderful products, but these announcements won’t cut your productivity by more than thirty percent.

“Norman AntiVirus does more than just ship without any known viruses,” he continued. “Its three always-on modules watch for known malicious code, suspicious behavior, and competing programs.” He double-clicked an icon on his desktop, then sat there quietly as nothing happened.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“I just launched Norman AntiVirus,” he explained. “We’re just waiting for it to come up.”

A minute later, an icon appeared in the system tray. “That’s the dictionary-based module,” he explained. A second icon eventually appeared. “The heuristic, logical module. Now the only one left is the…”

“…blue screen of death?” I asked, observing what was on the screen.

“Let’s look at our full security suite, Norman InSecurity,” he said as he rebooted. “InSecurity contains AntiVirus, so there’s no reason to have both of them on the same computer, although we recommend having both for maximum profit. Norman Insecurity is a complete security solution, containing AntiVirus, spam protection, a firewall, and a really mean pitbull.”

“A pitbull?” I asked incredulously.

“Not a real pitbull. We just altered the animation in Microsoft’s Search tool.”

By now Windows was up, and Norman double-clicked another desktop icon. “Our spam protection is phenomenal. Pay us enough, and we’ll protect your spam. We recognize and eliminate non-protected spam through statistical analysis.”

“How does that work?” I asked.

“Recent surveys show that fifty-five percent of all email is spam, so we remove fifty-five percent of your email. With our automatic updates, when spam climbs to sixty-five percent, so will we.”

By this time, Norman InSecurity was up and running. Eight icons adorned the system tray—three of them familiar from Norman AntiVirus. I asked him about the others. “The one that looks like a burning building is the firewall. The little can of meat is the spam protector. The flying calendar runs in the background at all times to remind you to renew your annual subscription. And the other two just use RAM and look nice.”

How does the firewall work?” I asked.

“I’ll show you.” He brought up the interface, which contained a slider bar that could be moved between extremes labeled Basic and eXtreme. “With the Basic setting, everything gets through. With eXtreme, everything gets blocked.”

“What happens if you set it somewhere in-between?”

“It automatically snaps to one or the other. Let me show you how it works with Internet Explorer.” He double-clicked the icon and waited. And waited.

“Sorry,” he apologized. “It’s a bit slow. I guess there’s an awful lot in memory.”

Half an hour later he rebooted.

“We also have a maintenance and data protection suite, Norman SystemQuirks, and a backup program, Poltergeist. I’ll just get them all running.”

As soon as Windows was up, he double-clicked several icons. “Once you’ve installed these babies, you never again have to think about them,” he bragged. “SystemQuirks runs its defragger 24/7, even if your PC is turned off. Delete a file, and it automatically recovers it. Poltergeist backs up constantly to anything it finds. Burn a music CD and you’re likely to find a copy of your address book, there.”

An hour later, his system tray stretched all the way to his Start button. “Of course, you need a pretty high resolution to fit all of the icons,” he admitted. “Plus a minimum of 2GB of RAM.”

Windows froze. “Norman,” I said, “I really don’t think people are going to like this.”

He brightened. “We also offer a great return policy. If you’re not entirely satisfied, you can return any of these programs for a refund of twice the purchase price. Of course, to receive the refund, you must prove that you have removed our program entirely from your hard drive. I’m pretty sure that can’t be done. It certainly can’t be done with our uninstaller.”

I was beginning to think that I had wasted enough time, and I wanted to get back to my own problems. “Norman, I’m sorry, but I really have to fix my notebook.”

He glanced at it. “Dies mid-boot?” he asked. I nodded. “Just remove the battery.”

That was the biggest shock of all. He was right.

© Copyright 2005 by Lincoln Spector