Let me give you a little background on myself. I'm in my early twenties, work two jobs and have a couple of hobbies. One of my hobbies fits in very nicely with both my jobs. I'm a computer programmer, and a damn good one, even if I do say so myself. (And I do. Self-promotion helps bring in the bickies.) That's my main, full-time job.
My second job is that of free-lance artist. I do computer generated art and am a wizard at Photoshop. I can create pictures that will have you swearing that fairies are real and living in your garden. I do quite a bit of work for the local estate agents, fixing up photos of houses by tidying yards and removing unsightly power lines and things like that.
As you might have guessed, computer generated art is one of my hobbies. The other is martial arts. I visit the local Judo dojo a couple of times a week. At Judo I am competent, but I'll never win any major tournaments. Neither will I ever start favourite in a minor tournament, but I have won a couple of those.
Anyway, my main job puts the bread and butter on the table for me, plus enough left over for some jam. My free-lance art helps bring in a bit of cream, which the tax man promptly tries to take.
I still live at home but am seriously considering getting my own place. I've got a reasonable deposit and am casually looking. I'm in no hurry.
I have the regulation two parents at home with me and a sister, pushing nineteen. At times I'm tempted to get her her own place, just to get her out of my hair. Snoopy thing, at times, always at my computer.
I have several computers. A box for my main PC and a couple of laptops. My art I do on my main PC. That's connected to the internet by cable and I get some real high powered speed from it. I recently replaced one of my laptops as it was getting sort of past it. Just too slow and too underpowered for the work I now do.
That old laptop is where the problem arose. That and my sister's snoopiness. I'd taken everything I needed off my old laptop and loaded it into the new one and I remembered to lock the new one away. I went through the old laptop and cleaned out all the extras I'd added to it and cleared all my work files and art off it. Because it was now a virgin machine I didn't need to lock it away. I just left it on my desk. I figured I could flog it to someone for a few bucks.
Now it was a Saturday morning and I had to go down the street, so I went. I left my main PC on because I wasn't going to be gone very long and it's not as though someone is going to bust in and jump on it. You will note that I'd completely overlooked my sister's snoopiness at this stage. Not that there was anything illegal or incriminating on the damn thing. The worst you would find would be the anime pictures that I do.
A useful sideline I have is drawing anime cartoons from people's photographs. I print them on iron-on transfer paper so that they can add them to a t shirt and wear their own anime character. Um, might I point out that female anime characters tend to be very generously endowed? I followed this trend when I sketch women's pictures. It is always a hit.
So I get back from my errand and I can hear giggling coming from the room that I use as an office. (Or studio, if you like, seeing I'm an artist.) Walking in I found Janet, my sister, and a friend of hers, Stella, paging through my work and laughing their heads off.
I snarled what the hell and the girls jumped. Janet sprang up out of my chair, bumped the old laptop I was going to sell and sent it flying. OK, you can drop a laptop and nothing will happen to it, especially on carpet. I don't know what went wrong this time. Maybe the fact that it was so old and it landed on a corner.
Whatever the reason, the laptop hit the deck and just came apart. Literally. The case seemed to just give up the ghost and fall to pieces. Even the screen broke. It must have hit something else when it fell off.
As you can imagine there was a profound silence at that point. The broken laptop didn't worry me because I'd already salvaged all the data and cleaned it out. I might have got a few bucks for it but then again, I might not. The chance, however, was too good to pass up.
I didn't yell, exactly. I just used a very firm voice to express my disapproval. Things like not touching my stuff, were mentioned. Smashing delicate equipment is a no-no. I might have talked about strangling them with their own entrails and throwing their bleeding corpses to the dogs.
Janet and Stella were dead quiet while I spoke to them. Stella was biting her lip but Janet was nearly in tears.
"Fortunately," I finished up, "that old laptop was just about dead in the water and I've already replaced it, so no real harm done."
After that last comment Janet wasn't anywhere near tears and Stella was looking at me rather lethally.
"The point I'm trying to make is that you have to leave my stuff alone, Janet. You're a computer illiterate and you could cause significant data loss if you don't know what you're doing, and you don't. Quite frankly, I don't care if you're eighteen. The next time I find you mucking around with my PC I'm going to put you over my knee and paddle your backside.
And that goes for your friends," I added, giving Stella a nasty look.
"You wouldn't dare," snapped Janet. "Mum would kill you."
"Possibly," I granted, "but that won't help your sore bottom, now will it?"
"He's just bluffing, Janet," piped up Stella. "I mean, as if he's going to spank me. I'm not his sister."
Now Stella is quite a lovely young lady, and she could give anime characters pointers in mammary development. I quite liked her, but right now she was pissing me off, encouraging rebellion in the ranks.
I sat down, jerked her arm so she stumbled forward and landed across my lap. A quick flick of her skirt and my hand came down hard on her bottom. Then I was setting her back on her feet before she even had time to finish her squeal of shock.
"Do you want to take any bets on whether I'll spank you?" I asked.
I could see Stella wanted to take a swing at me but was smart enough not to. She and Janet were the ones on the wrong and they both knew it. They departed, leaving me to clean up the busted laptop.
Now having known my sister for nearly nineteen years I knew just what she would do. As soon as my back was turned she'd be snooping. So I set up a little trap on the PC. It was a simple little program. Once running it threw up a little window asking if you want to continue. If you move the mouse at all it promptly renamed my major folios and hid them and announced that they'd been successfully deleted. Then it closed.
A second program would rename them back to the original names, so I had no problems, but my sister was going to have a litter of kittens, thinking she'd destroyed everything I'd ever done.
(In case you're wondering, I have ample backup of my work, on an external hard-drive and on the net. An idiot I am not.)
The trap actually took longer than I expected. However, the following Saturday I came home, sat down at my PC and found all my files missing. I triggered my little rename program and they all came rushing back, and then I went to have a quiet word with Janet.
I was in luck, because Janet was home and in her bedroom and the parents were out. They'd probably have objected to what was about to happen. I knocked and walked into Janet's room and she looked at me, went slightly pale and looked around the room for a quick exit.
There wasn't one and she went on the defensive straight away.
"It wasn't my fault," she yelled at me. "It just happened. I didn't actually do anything."
"Ah, what are you talking about?" I asked.
