Pop-Ups (Naughty or Nice) by Clare London

Author:Clare London [London, Clare]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: 2010 Advent Calendar
ISBN: 9781615817672
Publisher: Dreamspinner Press LLC
Published: 2010-12-23T06:00:00+00:00

*

I don’t know what I expected. Smoke? Sirens? Those funny pixel things, slowly peeling away the pictures on screen? At the very least, another huge advert. A promised prize, if I just bought this item, if I just took out this subscription, if I allowed them to bombard me with offers of an Enlarged Penis for the next six months….

That wasn’t what I got.

Instead, I got a slowly unfolding checklist, with a monstrous smiley emoticon at the top.

“Congratulations—you have won an exclusive prize! Complete this questionnaire—only takes a matter of seconds! Just let us know what kind of person you are, so that we can choose the prize to match your personality!”

God, but I hated emoticons. I’d told Henry about it many times, about the schoolboy humor they represented, about the unprofessional images they inserted into text messages which were really there to impart knowledge. Right?

But I loved questionnaires—and polls, and market research lists, and anything like that. It was a strange, rather embarrassing little vice. Henry had caught me once, filling in a poll about sandwich fillings, of all the ludicrous things, and we’d both ended up laughing about it.

I started to click away.

Age; gender; height; hair color. Straightforward.

Favorite sports; favorite film; favorite book…. I had no hesitation with any of these, either, because Henry often persuaded me into rather silly ‘lists’ like this. After a while, I realized he always guessed my preferences far more quickly than I guessed his. It was strange that a man who was so easy-going and footloose could have so many layers of discovery inside.

But anyway, we usually found a number of favorites that we shared, and I’d never bothered to delve into the game any further. That’s all it was, of course, a lightweight game.

Click, click. This was a much quicker response than waiting for my email, and the pop-ups seemed to have been banished completely. All that appeared were tasteful messages on a pale background.

“Thank you for your cooperation.”

Far more polite now, as well.

“Please wait a few moments while we process your response!”

I groaned to myself. What the hell had I been playing at? This was obviously where it all went pear-shaped. The whole thing was just another virus scam—it’d grind my whole system to a halt, and I’d have to drag Henry around here again, just as he was packing to go away, and ask him to take my PC to bits and crank it up to speed again. I couldn’t manage all through Christmas without internet access, without communication, without company. Without….

The small circle of dots whirled silently in the middle of my screen.

Without Henry. How many times had Henry been around to help me out, this month alone? It had to be six at least. Always coming around to give me one. A reboot, that was. And each time, I’d find myself fussing around the apartment, making him expensive coffee that he didn’t drink, and leaning none-too-helpfully over his shoulder while he tapped away and sighed at my excessive list of cookies and documents saved all over my desktop.

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