Norton is a Drama Queen.

Norton Antivirus, that is.

Two days ago, I looked at my computers calendar for something, and accidentally changed the date on the system, switching the month from August to September.

As a result of that minuscule alteration, Norton got totally freaked out, and in it's panic-stricken state, blocked everything.

I first noticed that things weren't exactly running smoothly, when I tried to access gmail from my favorites, and the page just kept refreshing over and over again, while giving me a nice blank white page to stare at. Simultaneously, LiveUpdate thought it was of vital importance that I update my virus protection, and at one point, it even tried to get away with saying that my subscription was out of date! (There's over 100 days left on it still!)

It took me the best part of an hour to get Norton to tell me what the hell actually had it's knickers in such a twist (so to speak,) and now that LiveUpdate has smoothed it's hackles, and gmail is still alive, I thought- "holy crap, all that chaos over the date on the computer?!"
-which was closely followed by the thought- "Jayzus, Norton really need to get their bloody act together when it comes to troubleshooting...."

Need I really say more? I mean, for the price that so many people pay just to keep their PCs from infections etc, they'd really want to put a bit more thought in to how their software reacts when something does actually go wrong. If this was Norton's reaction to me changing the date on the computer, what'll happen if/when the PC is threatened by something serious?

It's a scary thought.

Almost as scary as when my subscription runs out, and I feel like I'm being confronted by an angry mob boss asking for protection money....