WARNING: There Is A Trojan On Your Computer

WARNING: There Is A Trojan On Your Computer (explodingdog.com)

Clayton was telling me about how he's going to fix his coworker's computer and it reminded me of further evidence that life's tough, but it's tougher if you're stupid. I knew that Graeme would enjoy this one...

A few months back, I was on my parent's computer and it, well, sort of broke. It got some wacky virus that disabled Norton's ability to scan, but I was able to go in and look at its settings.
Now I know that Norton isn't always the best virus scan program out there, but, even despite its shortcomings, it still works better if it hasn't been disabled!!!
This scary virus was gobbling up programs... It hadn't eaten the burning program yet, so I just put all the files I wanted to keep onto CD and reformatted their computer...
Upon their return to town I explained what had happened and what I did to fix the problem. I then asked if they knew why Norton was shut off. They replied "Well, it kept popping up these annoying messages that wouldn't go away, so I found its options and changed them to make it not do that anymore" ...
I told them not to touch the Norton settings without talking to me or my step-brother-in-law first.

They phoned me the next day:
"The computer made a message"
"What? What are you talking about?"
"That program, it told us that a virus is here"
"Oh, Norton gave you an alert that you had gotten a virus and that it wanted to fix it?"
"Yeah. What do we do? It's that one from on the news yesterday"
"I don't watch the news. What virus?"
"Well, the one they always talk about on the news"
"I don't watch the news. What is its name?"
"Um, it's a horse"
"A Trojan Horse? That's a type of virus. Did it tell you exactly which one or what it wanted you to do to fix it?"
"No, they talked about it on the news. That's the virus. The news said so"
"Yup, it's a type of virus. Now did the message give you any instructions?"
"Yes. It said to click ok. So I did. Is it done now?"