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SHUT DOWN
Kayla was seated at the desk in her room, surfing the internet, and listening to some of mom and dad’s old favorite jazz tunes as they streamed to her computer from the family’s network server. It seemed as if it had been raining periodically for weeks, yet it had only been a few days; thank goodness for air conditioning. The time drug on for what seemed to be an eternity. It was a hot and muggy evening as she sat listening to the music. Without any notice, the song just stopped right in the middle of her favorite part as the artist held the note for what seemed like an eternity.
“Now what in the world is going on?” she exclaimed as she realized that she had also lost her internet access when she found herself staring at the infamous white page stating ‘Internet Explorer cannot display the page’, instead of the homepage of FOXNews.com. Then it hit her, “David!” she yelled, as she got up and stormed from her bedroom.
As she stomps down the hallway, she says, “I have got to get this research done so that I can finish this outline for my class. It is due tomorrow. I don’t have time for you to be meddling with the routers or the firewall”, she yelled as she burst into her brother’s room.
She looked around, and he was nowhere to be found. “What the…,” she thought to herself. “I know he’s home. He was here when I got home an hour ago.” Then it hit her as she snapped her fingers. She turned around, and off she went down the long hallway. Down the stairs she stormed as her blood pressure rose to a boiling point. As she walked furiously down the hall passing the family pictures and portraits, she glanced at one of her older brother David and gave it an evil stare. As she grew closer to the door of her dad’s office, she could here the sounds of someone pecking away on a keyboard and her suspicions were confirmed.
“I knew it!” she exclaimed, as she burst into the office. “Do you mind bringing the servers and internet access back online so that I can finish my research for my outline?”
“Research, my ass! I’m sure that you had that outline finished within 2 hours of being home from school the day you got the assignment. You were probably sitting there listening to Kenny G. and seeing if there was any Breaking News on FoxNews.com. I know you better than that.”
“Yeah, well mom and dad are going to make you wish that you had been working on your outline or studying for finals, instead of trying to hack into the servers. What are you doing anyway? Unless dad has changed something again, that’s not the remote interface for the household servers.”
“Shh, I’ve almost got it.” Dave said, as he typed uncontrollably at the keyboard.
“What have you almost got? What have you done now?”
“Dad rewrote the security policy and changed the administrative rights on several of the management consoles. While I was attempting to hack into them, I must have triggered something and set off a red flag, because as soon as it occurred you had no more FoxNews.com, the music server, and even the mail server… they all went offline. And I was just about there, when you came barging in here screaming and carrying on like some wild banshee.”
“So, what is it that you are saying?”
“What I’m trying to say is, (David plays with the keyboard) there I got it! We’re back up and running.” Dave said as he breathed a sigh of relief.
“So, what you’re telling me is that daddy developed a program that not only monitors the firewall and checks for invalid authorization, but will also disengage internet access, and shut itself down if someone attempts to gain access remotely?” Kayla said as she stood there with a puzzled look, scratching her head.
“I think so.” Dave replied. “But I am not one hundred percent positive that it matters if it is remote or not. I’m gonna have to talk with dad and find out. In any case, he has a glitch in the software, because I was able to make my way through, gain access, and bring everything back online.”
“Yeah, well, it’s a good thing that you did” said Kayla. “You keep forgetting that this house is tied to their office, and all hell would break loose with everyone from Langley to the Situation Room showing up within moments to find out what the problem is.”
His sister had a point. He hated when she was right about the little things. If one of the family’s computers, and especially one of the servers, went offline without a proper shutdown, then it sent up a red flag, and the Secret Service’s IT Manager sent out a team to find out what the problem was. With as many direct links to the White House, Langley, and several other places via phones, digital means, and many others, it would leave one to wonder that if a household can be this thoroughly protected, and in touch, then what do they have in the White House that you can’t find here.
Taking note of his sister’s words, David quickly exited from the server and said, “Quick! Go upstairs, get undressed wrap a towel around you and sit in the bathroom, and wait for my cue. Oh, turn the shower on, get it hot and steamy, and wet your hairdryer”.
Staring at him in a dismal state of shock and not sure what was going though her brother’s head at that moment; Kayla turns to him and says, “Have you lost your mind”?
“No, I have not. Now, go. Do it”, he said as he pushed Kayla out of the office, down the hall, and up the stairs. Moments later, he was back in his dad’s office putting everything back the way it was when the door bell rang.
“Damn! Do these guys have an office around the corner or what?” he says as he left his father’s office, closing the door behind him.
David calmly walked down the hallway to the front door. He opens the door to find two men standing in the doorway dressed in navy blue Brooks Brother’s suits with obtrusive abstract ties that Donald Trump wouldn’t wear on a bad day.
“Good evening, gentlemen, can I help you?” he says with an empty look on his face.
“Good evening, Mr. Ramlow”, says the first man standing in the foreground with a pair of Serengeti’s on. “We received a call from the office that one of your servers had gone offline. When the IT Manager could not make a connection with the backup server, he sent us out to check on things”.
David stands there with a puzzled look on his face for a brief moment, and then he rolls his eyes in the direction of the staircase as he says, “Women. Everything is fine gentlemen. My sister is upstairs taking a bath, and getting ready to go out. Somehow she knocked the hairdryer into the tub with it on as, as the tub was draining.
She is just fine. However, I did have to go and reset the breaker that she tripped. I guess, in trying to find the correct breaker, I must have somehow inadvertently turned off the breaker for the servers”.
Before David knew what was happening, the agent grabs him and pulls him out the door, handing him off to the second agent. He rushes up the stairs with his gun drawn and heads straight to the bathroom door.
The agent knocks twice on the bathroom door, and announces himself, “United States Secret Service. Ms. Ramlow? Are you alright?”
The bathroom door opens from the inside, and Kayla stands there with her hair wrapped in a towel, and one wrapped around her naked body, and says with a snappy retort, “Well, I would be much better if you were standing there holding a hairdryer for me instead of a forty caliber Glock 24.”
The agent stands in the doorway of the bathroom for a moment, and stares into it over Kayla’s shoulder, looking for anything out of the ordinary. Satisfied that all is well, he turns down the hallway and does a quick sweep of the remaining rooms upstairs. Satisfied that all is clear, he speaks softly into his wrist and says, “Second floor, clear.”
Once the agents had searched the house from top to bottom and failed to find anything out of place or suspicious, they turned and left as quickly as they had arrived.
“Thanks for everything, guys”, says David, as the agents climbed into their black Chrysler 300M and drove away.
As David is closing the front door, he finds that his head is being used to finish closing it, and his arm is wrapped in a painful position behind his back. “Don’t you ever put me in that position again”, says Kayla as she tightens the grips on head brother’s wrist and forehead at the same time. “I don’t appreciate standing there in a towel with a pistol in my face”.
“Oh pipe down. It’s all over”, says David as he stands there squirming in pain from the unique position his younger sister had placed him in.
“Well, what were you thinking? Or did you even bother doing that much”, says Kayla as she releases her brother. “I’ve been telling you for I don’t know how long, that one day you’re going to get caught hacking into those servers. It’s not a game, David. This is National Security that we are talking about here; not Amazon.com”.
“I know exactly who I am messing with. I don’t need you to tell it to me over and over again. I just have to figure out how to explain to dad that I found a major breach in the security policy so that he can inform the IT guys at The Department of Homeland Security”.
“Well, Einstein, you figure that out, and I am going to go put my clothes back on”, says Kayla as she starts up the stairs.
