Hi. I'm Steven Borrelli and I run the network for a school district in Bakersfield, California. That means the wiring, the servers, the e-mail, the labs in the schools, and about two thousand computers, give or take whatever the third grade did to the lab Macs this week. It also means that when one of our 1,800 teachers gets an e-mail saying a terrible virus is coming, I get it too. Usually forty times by lunch.

I don't blame anybody. The warnings are written to scare you, and teachers are good people who want to protect their friends. But after the twelfth copy of the same warning in one morning, I started noticing that they all look alike. They all shout. They all name somebody important. They all want you to send them on. My mother called bingo at the parish hall every Friday night when I was a kid, and one day in the spring, staring at copy number thirty-one, I thought: I could play bingo with these.

So here's the card. Print it out, keep it by the monitor, and next time a warning comes in, mark it. I've never seen a hoax that didn't get five in a row. Most of them black out the whole card.

1. Don't forward it yet. This is the whole game, really. Everything else is just for fun.
2. Take the FREE square if it came from your aunt. If it came from your uncle, your mother-in-law or the PTA president, take it anyway. I'm not strict.
3. Read the warning once, slowly, and mark every square it hits. Scroll all the way down. The good stuff is usually under the nine layers of > marks.
4. Five in a row, across, down or corner to corner, and you can call BINGO. It's a hoax. Delete it with a clear conscience.
5. Blackout (all twenty-five) means it's one of the classics and has probably been around since before you had e-mail.
6. If you only get two or three squares, that doesn't make it real. It just makes it a quiet hoax. When in doubt, ask your computer person. That's what we're here for, and I would much rather get one question than forty copies.

A note about O-62, the most important square on the card. Plain e-mail is just words. Reading words can't hurt your computer, the same way reading a postcard can't set your house on fire. The real viruses going around this year all ride in on something you have to open or run. So if a warning says the danger is in reading a message with a certain subject line, and the message has no attachment, you can mark B-12 and O-62 and relax.

(About B-7: Good Times was a warning that went around back in 1994 about a message that would erase your drive if you read it. There was never any such message. The warning was the only thing that ever spread, and it is still spreading. Every year somebody's new warning promises to be worse than it, which is easy, since Good Times never did anything at all.)

I don't want anybody to read this page and think there's no such thing as a computer virus. There is, and 1999 has been a busy year. Here are the four that kept me at the office late. Notice what they have in common.

Happy99 (January). This one came as a little program attached to an e-mail, called Happy99.exe. When you ran it, it showed you fireworks on the screen, which is what made people run it. While you were watching the fireworks, it quietly changed a file in Windows so that every time you sent an e-mail or posted to a newsgroup afterward, a second message went out behind it carrying a copy of Happy99. It didn't wreck anything, but it got around, because it came from people you knew.

Melissa (late March). The one everybody heard about. It was a Word document attached to an e-mail, and it came from someone you knew, because it sent itself. If you opened the document with macros turned on, Melissa mailed itself to the first fifty people in your Outlook address book. Each of them got a message from a friend, and some of them opened it too, and you can do the math. It brought some big companies' mail systems to their knees for a few days. A man in New Jersey was arrested for it in April.

CIH, also called Chernobyl (April 26). This one rode inside programs, not e-mail messages: you got it by running an infected program on Windows 95 or 98, maybe a game off a disk or something downloaded. It sat quiet until April 26, the anniversary of the Chernobyl accident, and then the version that went off this year wrote garbage over the beginning of your hard drive, and on some machines it tried to wipe the chip that starts the computer, so the machine wouldn't even turn on. It hit hardest overseas. We had none in the district. I'd like to say that was skill. Some of it was luck, and some of it was the antivirus update I pushed out the week before.

ExploreZip (June). This one looked like a reply to an e-mail you'd sent, with an attachment called zipped_files.exe. If you ran it, it went looking for Word, Excel and PowerPoint files, and some programmers' files, and emptied them out, so they were still there but had nothing in them. It searched network drives too, which is the part that gives a man in my job gray hair. Then it answered your new mail with copies of itself.

What they have in common: every one of them came in as an attachment or a program you had to open or run. Not one of them was a plain message that hurt you by being read. That's the difference between the real ones and the bingo ones.

What actually protects you:

• Keep your antivirus program up to date. The program is only as good as its list, and the list changes every week. If you're in our district, your machine updates itself; if you're at home, set yours to check at least once a week.
• Don't open an attachment you weren't expecting, even from someone you know. Especially from someone you know. If your principal sends you a file called list.doc with no explanation, pick up the phone and ask her.
• In Word, leave the macro warning turned on, and if it asks whether to enable macros in a document you didn't make yourself, say no.
• Back up the files you care about. Lesson plans on a floppy disk in your desk drawer have saved more teachers than I can count.

WHO'S CALLING
I've been doing networks since 1988, when the district had one file server and it lived in a closet next to the mop sink. I'm 37, I live in Bakersfield with my wife Marie and two boys who already know more about Nintendo than I know about routers, and I still have my mother's old bingo cage in the garage. She called numbers at the parish hall for twenty-two years and could do it with a cold, a headache and a church full of people talking. When I told her about this page she said, "Steven, you'll never get them to sit quiet long enough to mark a card." She's right, but I'm trying.

A grad student in North Carolina runs The Legend Lab, where he tests the forwards his aunt sends him one case at a time, including Good Times. If you like this page you'll like his. His aunt sounds a lot like mine.