Modern Day Triumph

I don't expect for a moment that you will follow this story, dear reader, as it is as banal as it is complex. My Norton antivirus on our main PC was up for renewal and at a cost which , while not extortionate,  was not minimal either. Since trying and failing to remove all traces of Norton antivirus from my PC about a year ago I have felt vaguely bullied by Norton. "Give us our money or we'll give your computer AIDS!!!", they seem to shriek. From Googling it is easy to see I am not alone in finding that once you have installed Norton antivirus on your computer its not easy to get rid of it completely and other antivirus programs then don't install well and won't work properly. About a week ago Norton  started flagging up that my subscription was about up and I'd need to renew. I thought about going into battle again, to cleanse my hard drive and registry of all things Norton but my experience is that as soon as you start to monkey with the guts of your computer you may learn a lot but you better have a lot of time on your hands because these things get messy and they get complex. Since the best projected saving I would make would be about £15 I thought it best to just let it pass and renew.

So this morning I renewed and in doing so waved goodbye to the last of the money in my bank til next Thursday - things being particularly tight at the moment. It was while I was idly looking at my subscription details that I spotted that the antivirus I have on my laptop is licensed for 3 machines and is not due for renewal until April next year. "You Bastard" I nearly shouted at myself and if I had the capacity to kick myself in the head I might have. I had just wasted the last of my money completely needlessly. I was starting to remember vaguely that last April I had got a new subscription of Norton on my laptop thinking I would download it to the PC come December. This is the kind of thing that I would have remembered in the past and where the hell you're meant to write all these things down I don't know. Anyway, I'd completely forgotten until it was too late. Except it wasn't too late was it? Was it possible that I could speak to Norton and get a refund? It was by no means obvious how to communicate with the great Norton. "Contact" took me to FAQs along the lines of "I love my Norton subscriptions so much I was just wondering how I could get some more?"...but finally I found that I could CHAT to someone on a helpline.

 "How do I know they're not charging me £10 a second?" I wondered paranoidly to myself so the first thing I asked the Indian sounding chap or chappess was "Am I being charged for this service?", but they responded fairly quickly that the service was free. To cut a long, pointless story short, it wasn't that hard to secure a promise of a full refund and then I just had 10 tension filled minutes of waiting to see if my antivirus from the laptop would REALLY download onto the PC or if Norton would come striding in at the last moment and go I TOLD YOU IF YOU DIDN'T RENEW YOUR SUBSCRIPTION I WAS GOING TO GIVE YOUR COMPUTER AIDS YOU LITTLE BASTARD AND THAT'S WHAT'S GOING TO HAPPEN!!!"

Ah but all was well and I now have 111 days of subscription still to go. And I have a little money in my bank again - or I will do after it has gone out and come back in again. I celebrated by buying a 2nd hand book off of Amazon for 46p.

Now I'm finding it hard to contemplate going for my Marcothon run as yesterday we ran 10 miles quite hard and having been mucking about on the computer all day it is now nearly dark and I am still in my pyjamas. Shameful. Get out there.