Those .exe files in full

Is there another word for synonym? What's another word for thesaurus? Why is the word abbreviation so long? Why isn't phonetic spelled the way it sounds? Have you ever imagined a world with no hypothetical situations? These are the kind of jokes that Squeezme sends me.

She calls them jokes; and she has hundreds of them. From her picture at http://pw2.netcom.com/~jampie96/squeezme.html I can tell you Squeezme is an attractive 30 year-old redhead. She lives in Cincinnati, Ohio, with her husband and two daughters. Behind her in the photograph you can see the original Bates house used by Hitchcock in the film Psycho.

But her jokes are harmless enough. She sends files of them attached to e/mails. Without any warning I can discover that my evening download time has tripled or quadrupled because Squeezme has sent me a file like strip1.exe.

If this never happened to you let me tell you that strip1.exe is an executable program and if a virus ever gets onto your system it will probably be an .exe file. Previous copies of strip1.exe have been sent to me only to be deleted. I already lost my virtual dog in a hard drive crash and I’d rather delete a joke than risk having to replace all my software.

But I know strip1.exe is from Squeezme because the e/mail it rode in on has jampie98@one.net for a return address. Only this week I let curiosity got the better of me. I went into file manager and double-clicked on strip1.exe and I waited while my cursor arrow became an hourglass. Something was happening. Strip1.exe, it turns out, is a virtual striptease program.

You get a radio button. You click your preference: male or female. I tried female. Up comes a colour picture of a woman who might be Pamela Anderson walking out of the ocean in a diaphanous negligee. On a panel to her right are two buttons: one marked Quit and one marked Start.

I thought I’d click on Start but Start moved before I could click on it. I went for it again. It moved again. I left it alone for a bit and then went for it again. It stayed still until I moved the cursor and that button moved again. That’s the strip1.exe program. That’s the tease. Thank you Squeezme. Very funny.

© Michael Burgess 1997

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