A Pain in the Ass — Both Cheeks!!

Can I get an 'oy'?

Everything’s fine. But for about an hour on Sunday I was hit with a tidal wave of inconveniences.

Originally we intended to go to New Haven, Connecticut to visit the Yale Art Museum and that crazy-lookin’ rare books collection that looks like it belongs on Bajor from Deep Space Nine. I’ve never been to either. I’ve been to the art museum at Princeton several times and it is impressive, as well as the one at the Rhode Island School of Design. (Neither Columbia University or New York University have anything comparable.) These plans were quickly nixed, however, when Sunday revealed itself to be insanely cold. I’ll admit that I felt a little silly letting something like a temperature dip alter my plans, but it simply wasn’t the day to march across a campus double-checking Google Maps that I was taking the fastest route.

Instead of looking at centuries of fine art, we went to Costco.

We’d been due for a long time. For God’s sake we’d been buying toilet paper at regular prices like a couple of schnooks. Considering the current ridiculous inflation on groceries—especially staple goods like eggs—Astoria’s Costco was even more of a madhouse than usual. Still, it was worth it. Two giant boxes of Cheerios for seven dollars. You can’t afford NOT to buy it!

So many whole grains!

After hitting the ‘co we were still feeling the grocery-buying urge, so we made a stop at Lidl, because sometimes you don’t need eleven pounds of grapes.

But wait, I am getting ahead of myself. While at Costco I got a text—one of those “two-factor authentication” notices, from, of all places, Hotels dot com. (I actually endorse Hotels dot com if you ever want to stay at a cheap but not gross place near an airport. I’ve accrued quite a number of points with them over the years. Any day now, a free weekend at the Sheraton in Chantilly, V.A. will be ours!)

Unsolicited 2FAs happen, and usually what it means is that someone is trying to get into a website and is accidentally putting in a wrong phone number. Makes sense. I got a second ping from Hotels dot com and ignored it. This will turn out to be important.

We hit Lidl and bought a ton of frozen cod. We’re gonna have cod on Wednesday, with brown rice and spinach. It’s going to be healthy and good. I’m gonna feel like a king come Wednesday.

We loaded up our Toyota, now with hundreds of dollars of Costco and Lidl goods. Time to get home and unpack. But wait … the car won’t start. The battery is dead.

Why is the battery dead? Batteries die, I guess. Especially in the cold. You’d think we’d get a warning, but we did not. Anyhow, using the GEICO app, we were able to book a guy to come (free of charge) and fix whatever needed fixing. But because it was so damn cold that there were tons of dead batteries out there. It was going to be a while, we were told. An hour wait soon became a “he’ll get there soon” (another hour, basically.)

Annoyingly, my phone was left uncharged from the night before and was now was nearing death. I couldn’t plug it in in the car because no battery! Whoopsie!

Luckily I had an old copy of Asimov’s Science Fiction from 1998 in the back, so I read an amusing essay by James Patrick Kelly. Back then he had a recurring column called On The Net, and this one was him kvetching about different search engines. As I chuckled through it I kept saying to my wife “wow, remember Lycos?” and “did you ever use Hotbot?” and “wow, Excite dot com!” She did not share my fondness for the early internet nostalgia.

Then I got a text from a friend wondering why the hell I was tweeting about cryptocurrency. She sent a screenshot and I immediately knew what happened—I was hacked.

I opened my email and quickly saw a series of emails from Spectrum (my internet company) which told me that I had changed my password.

I did not change my password, so now I started to panic. Honestly, losing my X account (I started calling Twitter “X” some time ago as a gag, but it kinda stuck) is no big deal. I shouldn’t be wasting time there anyway—it’s an anger engine and no longer a good way to network. But if someone was monkeying with my Spectrum account, who knows what else was going on?

I called Spectrum, but the hold time was 17 minutes. My phone was on fumes. So I left my wife and raced back home via an Uber to deal with this mounting crisis. Even though it was her idea for me to go, this is an accurate rendering of how I felt leaving my beloved alone in the Lidl parking lot.

I did, however, take the frozen cod.

I spoke to Spectrum and they didn’t know what the hell was going on. What I realized is that I had an old email address which was from Spectrum’s precursor, Time Warner Cable. (A “RoadRunner” account, if you remember such a thing.) That had been yanked from me—and the password changed—but I was able to change it to a new one, after a long rigamarole. I was back in control. My X account was associated with that email, so that’s how it got yanked away. The password has been changed and when you hit “forgot my password” it sends a 2FA to an email address that isn’t mine (and is starred out for, humorously enough, safety.)

All this tumult to tweet out some b.s. about crypto. Great security they have over there at X. So glad the leader of that organization is also in charge of the totality of the United States right now.

I still made a zillion phone calls—the bank, the credit card, PayPal—anything that touched the email address associated with the old email address. A very annoying way to spend an afternoon. In time, we got our battery replaced in the car. The guy who did it was really nice. He even checked out everything else in under the hood to make sure nothing else was about to collapse. We have a good “alternator” whatever that is.

Looking back now, none of this is a big deal. But I can tell you that it feels very peculiar to have the social media account you’ve used since 2006 (seriously!) start blabbing about crypto at the same time your vehicle drops dead. Incidentally, here is the second message that went out, making my friends laugh.

I filled out a form with X and maybe this problem will be fixed, but I’m not holding my breath. That whole place sucks. Once upon a time it actually got me work and boosted my

Anyway. I did nothing wrong. I didn’t click anything weird. Hacks just happen. It will happen to you, eventually. My only takeaway is to always charge up your cellphone. And be glad when you don’t go to New Haven in the freezing cold, you can’t Uber back to your house from there so easily.