Let’s say, hypothetically, that you have a somewhat nice car. You don’t really know much about it and you don’t drive it much, but you have a good friend who really loves it and really wants to drive it. So you give him the keys and let him have fun with it. He drives it recklessly until he has an accident and wrecks it up pretty badly, which you then have to pay for because it’s your car, and you suddenly find yourself in need of it. Your mechanic, knowing that you’re struggling financially, gives you a very generous discount and fixes your car up to almost brand-new condition. Your mechanic warns you that you shouldn’t let your friend drive it anymore, because he doesn’t know what he’s doing. And then you turn right around and give the keys to your friend again, who promptly gets into a fresh fender-bender.
Now, in the above hypothetical scenario, substitute “car” with “laptop,” “friend” with “twelve-year-old grandson,” and “mechanic” with “person who spent hours manually removing Trojans and malware from that machine for a lousy forty-five bucks because you really needed it to apply for jobs and you don’t have the recovery disks and I told you not to let the kid play with it anymore because I don’t want to go through this again and here he is downloading games and infecting it with viruses again because it’s not like he has a Wii AND a Kinect to play games on that he needs to use the grownup’s laptop AND smartphone too.”
Pictured: Where your “mechanic” would like to put you.
