Remeber the "Bad Times" email virus hoax. All this hysteria reminded me of it tonight, and I wondered what it might look like if I replaced the words "Bad Times" with "General Aviation":

WARNING, VIRUS ALERT:

If you receive an email message with a subject line of "General Aviation," delete it immediately WITHOUT reading it. This is the most dangerous virus yet developed.

It will rewrite your hard drive. Not only that, but it will scramble any computer disks and cassette tapes that are even close to your computer (up to 20 feet).

It will recalibrate your refrigerator's coolness setting so all your ice cream melts and your milk curdles. It will demagnetize the strips on all your credit cards, reprogram your ATM access code, screw up the tracking on your VCR and use subspace field harmonics to scratch any CDs you try to play.

It will give your ex-boy/girlfriend your new phone number. It will program your phone autodial to call only your mother's number. It is insidious and subtle. It is dangerous virus to be taken very seriously.

It will mix antifreeze into your fish tank. It will drink all your beer. It will hide your car keys when you are late for work and interfere with your car radio so that you hear only 1940's hits and static while stuck in traffic.

It will give you nightmares about circus midgets.

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 hotel 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 overwrite your word documents, changing all your active verbs to passive tense and incorporating undetectable misspellings which grossly change the interpretation of key sentences.

General Aviation will give you Dutch Elm disease. It will leave the toilet seat up and leave the hairdryer plugged in dangerously close to a full bathtub. It will remove the forbidden tags from your mattresses and pillows, and refill your skim milk carton with whole.

General Aviation is an evil virus conceived by evil people. It is your duty to help alert the world!

PLEASE FORWARD THIS MESSAGE TO EVERYONE YOU KNOW!!!