'Twas the virus before Christmas
By Andrew Zwicker
Ed. note: Every year on Christmas eve as young children, just before hanging our stockings on the mantel above the fireplace and heading off to bed our mother would read us The Night Before Christmas from a generations old hard-cover copy of the book. Now that my career has steadily moved further and further into the online world I thought I’d celebrate this Christmas with my own re-written version of the Christmas classic. Enjoy.
‘Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house
Not a laptop was stirring, not even the mouse;
The Blackberries were set on vibrate with care
In hopes that the new operating system update soon would be there;
The children were nestled all snug in their beds,
While visions of Ipads danced in their heads;
With servers shut down, the office locked in a snap,
I had just settled down for an extremely rare nap,
When out of my laptop there arose such a clatter,
I sprang from the bed to see what was the matter.
Onto the website and downloading the flash,
I opened up the troubleshooting page as my computer had crashed.
My screen went white like a new-fallen snow
and gave the lustre of mid-day to my keyboard below,
When, what to my wondering eyes should appear,
But a spinning hourglass, and a feeling of fear,
With a brand new processor, so lively and quick,
I knew in a moment it must be a trick.
More rapid than quad-core , the help desk they came,
And they diagnosed viruses, and called them by name;
“Now Trojan! now, Resident! now, Direct Action and Directory!
On, Macro! On Boot up! On worm and Poly!
To the top of the security patch! Over the firewall!
Now dash away! dash away! dash away all!”
As infected files do before the wild viruses fly,
When they meet with Norton, from the cloud in the sky,
So into my hard drive the tech support flew,
With their tray full of patches and security software too.
And then, I heard over the chat line as our online session lingers
The clicking and tapping of his speedy fingers
As I flipped on the webcam, the incoming video was found,
Downloaded through the fibre, St. Nicholas came with a bound.
His avatar dressed all in fur, from his head to his foot,
And his clothes were all tarnished with ashes and soot;
A bundle of software he had downloaded from his recovery pack,
his help was greeted like a peddler just opening his sack.
His glasses — how they twinkled! As on my computer he played host!
His cheeks were like snow, as white as a ghost!
His teenaged mouth was drawn up like a bow,
And the beard on his chin still hadn’t started to grow;
The stump of a pipe he held tight in his teeth,
Made out of licorice, he’d taken off the wreath;
He wore an Atari shirt, his style, no frills,
That shook, when he laughed at my lack of computing skills.
He was skinny and boney, a right jolly old elf,
And I laughed when I saw him, in spite of myself;
A click of his finger and a nod of his head,
Soon let me to know I had nothing to dread;
He spoke not a word, but went straight to his work,
I had downloaded some malware; I felt like a jerk,
And laying his finger aside of his mouse,
And giving a nod, into cyberspace he rose;
He sprang back to his cubicle, to his team gave a whistle,
The barbs of their taunting as sharp as a thistle.
But I heard him exclaim, before he logged off my site,
“Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good-night.”
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