I've been thinking a lot about conspiracies since last week, mostly because things around the assessment don't make sense. I can't quite figure out the chain of events or why they might have happened.
Since I've been going over and over events from the last couple of months in my head, one thing occurred to me. I hadn't given it too much thought at the time, more than it being just a major annoyance. But now in a different context, maybe there was more to it. As I mentioned in an earlier post about a month ago, I had a particularly nasty spyware infection on my computers. It was sending screenshots and keystrokes to some remote site. At the time, I took it to be a random event that just happened to hit me, but now that there seems to be something more going on, is it possible that the infection was intentionally meant for me? Is someone spying on me?
I brought it up yesterday with Josh and he immediately reprimanded me for not telling him sooner. This was right up his alley. Like me, Josh is in the I.T. field, but he's more of a hard-core, classic developer by profession. But the reason his interest was particularly piqued was because he also has a bit of a history as a hacker. He'd been doing it for years ever since he was young. He never did anything malicious and it was mostly just to see if he could get access somewhere. And he was generally successful. He has even been hired a few times by various companies to attempt ethical hacking and penetration testing on their networks. So hearing that my systems were infected like this really grabbed his attention. It didn't hurt that Josh tends to be a bit of a conspiracy theorist anyway.
He said I should have told him right away when it happened so that he could have investigated more deeply for me. Of course at the time, I didn't really think too much about it. Plus I had to get my notebooks back in business quickly to be able to work, so I had to take the quick route and reformat and re-install everything. But now Josh was on a tear about this. He said I was too trusting of this kind of thing, not in a critical way, but just trying to be more positive and corrective. To him, this was definitive proof that there was some kind of conspiracy going on and, since the events seem to revolve around RAMJAC, they must be behind the spying. Even though it might sound like the usual conspiracy theory rhetoric, Josh insisted that RAMJAC had the money and self-interest to do whatever they like to whomever they like.
Josh joked that RAMJAC deserved a little of their own medicine and he should spy back on them. And even though he said it as a joke, I saw the light bulb go on in his brain. Suddenly it was not only a challenge, but also a way to "stick it to The Man". I told him that he couldn't do it. I wouldn't have him do anything illegal and get into trouble for me. Of course, part of me was intrigued. Maybe this was finally a way to get some answers. We argued over it for several minutes before Josh insisted he was going to do it whether I liked it or not. Even though I still felt guilty about him risking himself for me, I was glad that he was looking out for me. I reluctantly agreed and thanked him.
So then we started discussing what should be done and how to go about it. It didn't take long though before we were stuck. For a company of RAMJAC's size, where would we even begin? Even if Josh could get access to their systems, what would we look for? It soon became clear that we were going to need someone to guide us and help navigate. That finally brought us around to the topic that the two of us had been avoiding ever since I moved in with Josh -- Evan. He had contacts within RAMJAC and might be able to help us.
Evan had made some attempts to contact me over the last week since our fight, but I'd been avoiding him and refusing to call him back. I felt I wasn't ready to talk to him yet since I still felt betrayed. But now, here's it was, an excuse to reach out to him. And I was thankful to have it. Even though I was still feeling hurt, I knew it was time to talk to him again.
It was good to have an excuse to talk to Josh about Evan as well. Josh is still my best friend and to be excluding part of my life from him didn't seem right. So we talked for a long time about it and, this time, I didn't hold any of my feelings back. I gave Josh the complete picture. I could tell that the topic made Josh uncomfortable, particularly to start. However by the end, I could see that he at least understood my situation and could accept my feelings for Evan, even if he wasn't completely on board.
So now, the next thing to do is to talk to Evan.
0 comments:
Post a Comment