11 June 2003

Numbers

I am a little frustrated this morning. I couldn't log on to AOL- nothing unusual in that, but there was a pop-up prompt box at my screen-name sign-on that said to "log-on as the master user "for an urgent message from the Service." I had to think for a moment. The master account screen name is my initial and a string of numbers. I signed up for AOL maybe a decade ago. It seemed like an expensive luxury at the time, and things were not easy in the cyber world. I couldn't ever remember the numbers. It was an actively unfriendly password and I never used it. I set up my own screen-name, and one for the ex and the kids when they got interested and there the matter lay until this morning.

I was listening to the BBC and edging into the day, fumbling with the keys. It had been a strange birthday evening. There us a minor firestorm in my personal life, and thus spent my discretionary hour after returning home down at the pool, underwater, where the phone couldn't get at me. The Lifeguard was a nasty little kid with a goatee and a Hitler complex. I resolved to do something about him this summer before he did something to me. I had his number as much as he had mine.

After he shut down the pool I wandered back upstairs, talked to the kids and to my Mom, thanking her for my birth and laid down on the bed. I awoke at two, still on top of the covers. I fixed that and turned off some lights and slept well until past time for the alarm to go off. Vicki Barker was talking about a lot of stuff, currency controversy, a new SARS outbreak in eastern Ontario, more problems from the sad provinces of the former colonial powers of Africa. I had thought the lead of this letter would be something like "Monrovia on the Brink," about the awful decade-long struggle for power and then I would try to weave something humorous and ironic into the mix. I wasn't sure I could find anything that humorous but you never can tell and was arranging my palate of stories to see what might come out of the morning collision of ideas.

Instead the radio faded into the background. First up was a screen alerting me to an attempted intrusion overnight and a question box to ask if I wanted to trust the originator. I brusquely typed "No" and when I hit the AOL icon, a pop-up box told me there was an important message for me and I had to log on using my master screen account name.

"Ugh," I thought. A computer problem to start the day. I went to the little pull-down menu and brought up the string of letters and numbers and tried to log on with a password that was ancient. No dice. I tried all the variations of the password I could think of and was left with a prompt that said "invalid" and an admonition to call the members hot-line number for account service. I dutifully did so and was greeted within five minutes by a businesslike woman who claimed she was "Nancy" but whose rich rolling vowels told me was from India. I realized I was probably talking to an out-sourced AOL service center in Bangladore, a giant cube farm filled with young Indians on headsets in a modern building in an ancient land. I adjusted my attitude. I had to listen carefully to what she was telling me. Her English was excellent, but it was different enough that I had to pay attention and I had not consumed enough coffee yet to be really awake.

To verify my identity she first wanted my address. I gave her the current one, but she didn't like it. Then I gave the previous apartment number, thinking this was linked to the credit card that AOL debits each month for the access privilege. Nancy didn't like that address, either. Nor did she like the former marital residence in Fairfax County, the nice large home that my ex enjoys. No soap with that one, either. I tried to dredge through my wind. I tried the California address where we were assigned, no match, and then was at a loss to remember the one before that. I can remember it now, the first home we ever bought, but it wouldn't have mattered. It wasn't the right one.

We went round and round, Bangladore and me, and finally she allowed as how the correct address in their records was the California one and I wracked my brain for the right number on the house. I had the street right, but I was having a problem with all the numbers this morning. It had been across from the Naval Base commissary and liquor store. It was a perfect location. But the numbers did not seem to have stuck in my brain. Maybe it was because I was now 52 years old, and I was having enough trouble remembering that.

Was it "121" or "225?" I finally got that correct to Nancy’s standards and then came the show-stopper of the zip code. Don’t California codes start with "8"? Or was it "9"? Nancy was becoming quite stern with me. I sensed a legacy of resentment with the Colonial system, an instituion with which I had absolutely nothing to do this morning. I played for time. I shut down the log-on screen on AOL and switched to Microsoft Internet Explorer and hit the Google site and entered "Coronado California Zip Code" while I stalled Nancy. On the second hit I found the two zip codes for the island city in San Diego Harbor and I read it to her off the screen. It worked. She seemed to relax a little, eager to be off the call with me and keep her numbers up. Service Desk work is for the young and hungry.

Then she asked me for the last four digits of the card I used to pay for the service. I don't know about you, but I am concerned about credit card theft and I know that the AOL data base is a huge target that has been compromised before. So I use a Discover card that I keep a zero balance on each month. It pays for a Mobile Speedpass that my younger son abuses for gasoline and the AOL account that I share with the ex and the kids. I do it that way so I have a clean and discrete slate of things that I can disavow in case my son loses the Speedpass or hackers get into the master computers at AOL in Fairfax County.

I do not carry the card and I have no idea what the last four might be. I kept talking to Nancy, stalling for time. I remembered paying the bill last week and had not filed the statement yet. I went to my little desk area and started to rummage through the detritus of the week. I found several things, none of them relevant, and remembered I had to check out of the Navy today, second to last stop on the retirement express. But that did not seem to interest Bangladore.

Nancy was now just about out of patience with me. I was frantic to find the last four and finally realized that the master folder of old bills and discount offers was in the filing cabinet in my walk-in closet underneath the week's mounting pile of clothes for dry-cleaning. Nancy was telling me to find the number and call the Service Center back when I found the folder marked "Discover" nestled between "Day's Inn Info" and "Divorce."

I shed low-interest rate offers and terms of agreements across the closet floor and finally found a statement. I read Nancy the last four digits and she was satisfied that I was me and no one else. She finally got to the point. Nancy's round vowels informed me that the screen name of my younger son had originated a number of e-mail at three in the morning, 226 of them simultaneously. I blinked.

Then she gave me a new password, and told me all the screen-names had been changed so that access could be controlled. I thanked her and let her get to the next call there in Bangalore, where it was just coming on evening as I began to address my dawn.

The implications were pretty straightforward. Either my son had gone into the Spam business as a bridge to his summer employment or the computer out in the County had a virus that made it a slave to some remote hacker who was using my son's screen-name to mask his transmittal of ads for Viagra or Mortgage Quotes or Breast Enhancement or any or the other spams that show up unwanted on the incoming message queue. I had twenty of them myself when I finally got on the system. I don't think I set up a firewall on the computer when I bought it for the kids last Christmas, and I had an alert on my screen this morning that some nefarious cretin had tried to convince my laptop at the apartment that it was part of a local area network, the better to hi-jack it for some other purpose, using my broadband access to do something awful in the vast sea of the internet.

Anyhow, I have some stuff to do today besides process into the retired force. I need to get ahold of the kids and the ex and tell them how to change their screen names. And I need to work on my ability to retain numbers.

Sometimes they can be important.