• DISNEY VIRUS: Everything in the computer goes Goofy.

• MIKE TYSON VIRUS: Quits after one byte.

• KEVORKIAN VIRUS: Searches your hard drive for old files and deletes them.

• MARTHA STEWART VIRUS: Takes all your files, sorts them by category, and folds them into cute little doilies to be displayed on your desktop

• POLITICALLY CORRECT VIRUS: Never identifies itself as a “virus,” but instead refers to itself as an “electronic micro-organism.”

• GALLUP VIRUS: 60% of the PC’s infected will lose 30% of their data 14% of the time (plus or minus a 3.5% margin of error).

• TEXAS VIRUS: Makes sure that it’s bigger than any other file.

If you receive an email entitled “Badtimes,” delete it immediately.

Do not open it. Apparently this one is pretty nasty. It will not only erase everything on your hard drive, but it will also delete anything on disks within 20 feet of your computer. It demagnetizes the stripes on ALL of your credit cards. It reprograms your ATM access code, screws up the tracking on your VCR and uses subspace field harmonics to scratch any CD’s you attempt to play.

It will re-calibrate your refrigerator’s coolness settings so all your ice cream melts and your milk curdles. It will program your phone autodial to call only your mother-in-law’s number. This virus will mix antifreeze into your fish tank. It will drink all your favorite root beer. It will leave dirty socks on the coffee table when you are expecting company.

Its radioactive emissions will cause your toe jam and bellybutton fuzz (be honest, you have some) to migrate behind your ears. It will replace your shampoo with Nair and your Nair with Rogaine, all while dating your current boy/girlfriend behind your back and billing their restaurant rendezvous to your Visa card.

It will cause you to run with scissors and throw things in a way that is only fun until someone loses an eye.

It will rewrite your backup files, changing all your active verbs to passive tense and incorporating undetectable misspellings which grossly change the interpretations of key sentences.

If the “Badtimes” message is opened in a Windows XP environment, it will leave the toilet seat up and leave your hair dryer plugged in dangerously close to a full bathtub. It will not only remove the forbidden tags from your mattresses and pillows, but it will also refill your skim milk with whole milk. It will replace all your luncheon meat with Spam.

It will molecularly rearrange your cologne or perfume, causing it to smell like dill pickles.

It is insidious and subtle. It is dangerous and terrifying to behold. It is also a rather interesting shade of mauve. These are just a few signs of infection.

PLEASE FORWARD THIS MESSAGE TO EVERYONE YOU KNOW!!!

• You wake up at 3 a.m. to go to the bathroom and stop to check your e-mail on the way back to bed.
• You get a tattoo that reads “This body best viewed with Internet Explorer 6.0 or higher.”
• You name your children Amazon, Ebay and Dotcom.
• You turn off your high speed modem and get this awful empty feeling, like you just pulled the plug on a loved one.
• You spend half of the plane trip with your laptop on your lap…and your child in the overhead compartment.
• You decide to stay in college for an additional year or two, just for the free Internet access.
• You laugh at people with dialup.
• You start using emoticons in your snail mail.
• Your hard drive crashes. You haven’t logged in for two hours. You start to twitch. You pick up the phone and manually dial your ISP’s access number. You try to hum to communicate with the modem. And you succeed.