First off, I’ll admit something that I’m not necessarily proud of: I watch Smallville and enjoy it. I watch it in batches. We don’t have cable, and our reception at the old place was terrible; we only got in Fox. We get a few more channels now, but it requires effort, and I don’t really have time to watch any TV anyway.

Except that every once in a while, a coworker of mine loans me a VHS tape chock full of Smallville episodes. Recently he gave me one with 8 episodes. I know it’s a stupid show with poor dialog, but I enjoy seeing how they’re retelling the story of Superman. Some of it is fairly clever.

My point in admitting this is because a part of an episode we watched last night irked me. Consider this exchange:

Lex has gone into the IT lab of luthorcorp, and meets a sexy IT woman (she’s actually not an actual employee and has broken in, but that’s not germaine)

Lex: I’m trying to do some work, and my program keeps crashing.
woman: Hmm… It sounds like a virus.
Lex: That’s what I thought.
woman: Here. (handing him an unlabeled CD) This gets rid of viruses.

Is that not just the most generic, ridiculous dialog you’ve ever heard? I mean, aside from Star Trek: Next Generation, where every problem was solved with tachyon pulses?

It really irks me for no good reason when movies and tv shows don’t even try for verisimilitude concerning technology. I’ll bet there’s a website out there that tracks the egregious misrepresentation of technology in fictional media. I’m going to find it.