On a recent, ordinary Tuesday, I was sitting at my desktop computer, about to check the weekly sales at my food market. Suddenly on my large computer monitor (great for my Zoom classes), multiple boxes appeared with frightening warnings:
“Don’t turn off your computer or you’ll lose all your data!”
“You’ve been hacked!”
“Call the Microsoft number on the bottom of the screen immediately!”
And, to make matters even scarier, there was a woman’s voice loudly repeating the above messages.
After many years depending on my computer, like most people, to be sure, I was frightened. And so I called the Microsoft number on the screen. (It turned out that the number, was the actual Microsoft number; just the area code was wrong. It was the area code and number of an actual person living in Hayes, Virginia, but more about that shortly.)
The man who answered said, with a slight foreign accent, that his name was Travis Wilson, and he told me to “calm down.” He said he had been receiving calls from many people whose data had been hacked, and he reassured me he would fix the situation. He then gave me an employee ID number, a phone number and an extension number. He added Microsoft’s address: 1 Microsoft Way, Redmond, Washington — which happens to be the correct Microsoft address.
In answer to one of Travis’ many questions, I said I did no banking online (I don’t, and that is fortunate). But as a writer and teacher and researcher with business and personal…
