I enjoy watching suspense movies and I like some horror movies, not the slasher kind with lots of blood and gore, but the more restrained ones.

But I don’t like to be frightened in real life.

Like the time back when I was living in the Wissahickon neighborhood of Philadelphia, oh, it must have been perhaps 2003 or so. I can date it because I remember that I had a Windows PC (shudder!) in the upstairs den (no, that’s not the horror that I’m referring to) and an iMac in the living room. So it must have been sometime in the 2002-2003 timeframe. Best guess is 2003.

It was a dreary Saturday afternoon and I was surfing the web on the iMac and came across an indie movie that looked interesting, so I tried to download it, but my Internet connection in those days was kinda slow so it was taking a long time to download, so I just gave up and went upstairs to the Windows PC.

After a few minutes I realized I had an errand to do, so I ran downstairs, got on my jacket, and left the house, remembering to set the alarm. Then I trotted down the Hundred Steps and made my way to the CVS drug store which was about a ten minute walk.

On returning home, I went back upstairs to log my purchases into my personal finance software which I still kept on the Windows PC in those days.

And then all of a sudden I heard voices.

I heard two guys speaking to each other in low tones.

Coming from downstairs.

Had I remembered to set the burglar alarm when I left? Yes, I was sure that I did. Had I locked the door when I returned? Yes, it was so automatic, that I— 

Well, maybe I had forgotten.

What if I was distracted and had forgotten? What if a couple of thugs had followed me back and were now downstairs casing the joint?

I really didn’t have anything valuable worth stealing. Lots of books. Lots of CDs. A large screen TV. Furniture. No large sum of cash lying around. There just wasn’t anything that two thugs would want. 

The burglar alarm had a panic button on a key fob that I always kept in my pocket. All I had to do was press it, and the alarm would go off and it would send a signal which would get a squad car racing to my house pretty quickly. The house used to be occupied by an Assistant District Attorney and many of the police in the area still believed that to be the case, so they tended to respond very quickly. I knew this from a couple of false alarms that had been triggered in the past couple of years.

Actually, if I pressed the panic button, the sound of that alarm itself would probably be enough to scare away the intruders, whoever they were. It was a very loud alarm.

But I thought I should get a look at the thugs first, I don’t know why.

So I gingerly started to climb down the staircase, one step at a time, very quietly, slowly, just so I could get a look at whoever was there.

They were still talking quietly to each other, but as I went down the stairs, I couldn’t see anybody.

I finally got to the bottom of the staircase, and there didn’t seem to be anybody there. But I still heard the two guys talking to each other.

And the sound was coming from my iMac.

I finally realized what had happened. That video that I had tried to download about an hour ago had finally completed downloading, and when it completed, it began to play automatically. And the opening scene was two guys talking to each other.

There oughta be a law against automatic playing of videos.