Beware! If you receive a message with a subject line of "Badtimes", delete it immediately without reading it. This is the most dangerous e-mail virus yet.

It will rewrite your hard drive. Not only that, but it will scramble any disks that are even close to your computer (20' range at 72 degrees Fahrenheit). It recalibrates 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 CD's you try to play. It will program your phone AutoDial to call only your mother-in-law's number. It will hide your car keys when you are late for work and interfere with your car radio so that you hear 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 the while changing all active verbs to passive tense and incorporating undetectable misspellings which grossly change the interpretation of key sentences. "Badtimes" will infest your armpits with fleas of a thousand camels. It will rewrite your back-up files, leave the toilet seat up and leave the hair dryer plugged in dangerously close to a full bath tub.

It wantonly removes the forbidden tags from your mattresses and pillows, and refills your skim milk with whole. It is insidious and subtle. It is dangerous and terrifying to behold. It is also a rather interesting shade of mauve. These are just a few signs. Be afraid. Be very afraid.

PLEASE FORWARD THIS INFORMATION TO EVERYONE YOU KNOW.