My wife is downloading three files of Neil Diamond's "Cherry" so that she can have one or two "extra" copies just in case...

Downloading Disaster Narrowly Averted

ON THE PEER-TO-PEER NETWORK-- I just upgraded my computer to a Pentium 4, and I decided to give the old Pentium III machine to my wife. I figured it was about time we had two computers in the house, because she was already spending too much time on my machine. My wife was like any other computer newbie--she liked to play Solitaire, Minesweeper, and the occasional game of Hearts.

So to get her away (far away) from my new machine, I gave her the old box, bought her a cheap desk from Staples, connected a router to the cable modem, and set her up on the home network.

My wife (still new to the Internet), had never heard of Napster, Limewire, or Kazaa, popular music sharing programs that brought your favourite songs to your desktop in mere minutes.

In fact, her only experience with the World Wide Web was when she visited a Desperate Housewives fan site. But she loved music, and the idea of peer-sharing MP3s was an exciting idea for her.

So I helped her establish an account on Kazaa just to get her started. She took a few moments to get used to the software, and then she started searching through the massive lists of song titles. She put in requests for her favourite music artists and then she was underway.

She created a directory (with a little help) to store her songs, and then she installed Winamp (all by herself!) to play them. She had a decent set of Sony headphones, so I wouldn't be disturbed while she played her new tunes. She was all set. Or so I thought.

All was going well, and she seemed to be getting the grasp of things. So I left her to her own devices while I worked on installing all the software I needed to get my new machine functioning.

Shortly thereafter, I looked over and noticed that there were several downloads in progress (excellent!), and she looked quite satisfied with her minor computer victories. There was even one user uploading a song from her new music collection. Everything was working it seemed.

I looked over again, and she appeared to be listening to music now! Great! I guess my wife wasn't as computer illiterate as I had first thought her to be.

Ah, but the peace didn't last. My wife became agitated, and worry lines started appearing on her face. No, it wasn't worry--it was panic! She waved me over hurriedly to look at the "frantic" activity on her screen.

"What are you doing dear?" I asked her curiously, when I noticed her hard drive was filling up with duplicates of The Police's Every Breath You Take. "Hey! You're downloading songs you've already got!"

"No, I'm not," she replied, nearly crying. "I'm just trying to get back the songs that these other users keep taking away from me!"