Provoked by pesky pop-ups

Being Frank, by Frank Ameduri

When I first began surfing the Internet, I was amazed at how much information was available out there. With a few taps of the keys, I could be translating English sentences into Spanish, Spanish sentences into Sanskrit and then the Sanskrit back into English. I typed in my last name and discovered there are a mind-boggling number of Ameduri's in the world, and that I'm related to a bunch of them. I e-mailed a couple of them until they started asking for money my uncle Cosmo owed them. Anyway, the Internet was new and wondrous to me in those years of virtual innocence.

It doesn't take much surfing before the problems begin to crop up, however. It began with the unlucky discovery of a gaming site. They had video poker, blackjack, keno and a bunch of other games. Each came with a chatroom where gamers could converse while enjoying a leisurely few minutes of clean fun. Sixteen hours later you realized you were hunched over your keyboard with hair growing on your teeth and you were flirting with a 60-year-old rabbit trainer with a criminal record. Of course, you had amassed 870,000 credits, which you could trade in for a California Raisin key chain or an "I'm not with Stupid … I am stupid" tee-shirt.

Two weeks later I was in a 12-step program for Internet fiends, and my Carpal-Tunnel Syndrome was so bad my mouse arm just stuck straight up in the air all the time. People kept calling on me at meetings, but I had nothing to say.

I managed to escape the clutches of that gaming site, but I never fully returned to the educational side of the Web. I discovered espn.com and all the possibilities for fantasy sports on the Internet. I had an e-mail address at 12 different browser sites. In a Herculean effort to remember all my addresses and passwords, I forgot where I lived, and I once forgot to breathe for 16 minutes. I'm past all that now, too.

But the virtual sickness has many stages, and you're never really finished with it. Now the Internet is no longer just a tempting opportunity to make bad choices. Now it's making bad choices for me. The Internet has lost its patience with us, it seems. The opportunities to spend brain-dulling hours at completely worthless endeavors grow exponentially by the minute, and the Internet has realized we are not biologically equipped to make that many bad choices on our own. Thus the birth of bad-choice-enhancing gadgets and gizmos -- like pop-up windows and spam.

Whoever invented the pop-up window should be tied to a chair and force-fed his PC, his laptop, all his software and his college diploma. The pop-up window is like having an annoying, little salesman hiding behind your furniture. You sit down with a bag of cheese puffs, and the little feller pops out from behind the couch, "Hey! I see you like crunchy, cheesy things. How about trying some of my Gorgonzola pork rinds?" You hit him with a throw pillow and he's gone. As soon as you change the channel on the TV he pops up from under the coffee table, though. "Oh, a big fan of crime dramas, I see. How about purchasing this authentic NYPD vice badge and a pair of silk-lined handcuffs?" You can mash the little bugger with the pillow as many times as you like, but he just keeps coming back for more. You can't faze him.

I once downloaded a program that was supposed to prevent the pop-ups, but it just kept crashing my computer and making my toaster oven turn on for no apparent reason. When I finally removed the program, all the pop-ups that had been blocked came in at the same time. The computer wasn't even turned on. The pop-ups just shot out of the speakers and piled up in the office. It took me three days to get rid of them, because every time I crumpled one up for the trash, two more opened up.

Now, pop-ups don't even just pop up and sit there until you click them away, either. Now they actually do things to your computer. The other night, I was checking NFL injury news. Out of the blue a pop-up appeared that said, "Congratulations! You've been randomly selected to take part in a poll." The poll was about single people seeking other single people on the Web. To help me out, the pop-up turned espn.com into some singles' dating site. It didn't want to go away, either. I hit the "back" button, but the singles' site just kept popping back up. Another pop-up appeared that said, "Take the poll, or we're calling your girlfriend." I unplugged the computer, and the phone started ringing. "I'll get that," my girlfriend said.

"Don't believe them!" I shouted. "I can explain! It's not what it looks like!" It turned out to be some guy selling timeshares in Barbados.

Frank Ameduri is currently hiding in Barbados from his computer. Don't get him started on spam.