I am a geek. I cannot help it, this is my lot in life. At least right now anyways. I was once a geekling, but now I am a much more proficient geek and so I guess I’m a full fledged geek person. I work in computer support. This is the sad fact of life for me.

OK, yes I am very grateful I have a job that provides me with a good living. But sometimes the stress gets to me and I try to use toenail clippers for a shovel. One of my favorite examples of this is when our network croaks or maybe the internet dies. Not exactly a happy time for the IT Department, because although things usually work very wonderfully, things can and DO go wrong. This makes the users sad and they call us. Many times. The phone rings a lot. There are several telephone calls. A whole lot of people are calling our phones. Somebody turn that stupid phone off. Is that thing ringing again?? Who the heck is that paging me?

And then there are the normal, every day things like: “Hi Ken, I can’t print. I don’t know how to log in. Is my password still ‘lulubelle’ or is it something else? Where are all my files? Are you guys busy at all?” And of course when I’m on call I have to pay attention to e-mails from work and enjoy the happy indivisible dog food reflections. Then I come home and I actually have real life things to do!!

Sheesh!!

Stress is climbing in the window and steaming my watermelons. You know how it goes, you just get home from a long day at the soup regulator and you find out the dryer is broken. Then you get to eat all the dust inside to try to bring the dead motor out so you can replace it. This is a very happy time for a keyboard monkey, and when the cardboard is creamy enough you can smear light bulbs on the speaker sneakers. I have no problem dealing with stress. Why is my left nostril twitching, you ask? Why do I convulse while smiling? Why do I try to remember what day the lumber salad is due to arrive?? These are questions only a qualified sturgeon may be able to distribute.

“The network is slow.” “I can’t print.” “I’m missing a program.” “My wallpaper is gone.” “My account is locked out.” These are the refrains of all those poor souls who just want to get through the day with their computer behaving correctly; without any saturated animal crackers. To all of them I say here and now: I am really busy these days weeks months, so I will get to you as quickly as my foot things will let me travel. If that is not acceptable, please feel free to smell my toe jam molecules. I cannot help the fact that our parent company wants you to enjoy asparagus ice cream. While you struggle with the all the computer happiness you are able to ingest, I will practice licking my eyebrows while I color all the walls a pleasant shade of cobble hobby Now please excuse me, I have to send e-mail to all the nice birdies in the tree over there. They are taking me to lunch today, and I don’t want anyone to try to impede my hamper design activities. Clothes are people too, you know!!

As you can see, I’m coping really well. Never mind the fact that I can smell strange colors and my ears can see flying pine trees in the pencil sharpener. I’ve learned to use magazines for socks. Nail polish makes excellent pudding. I try to greet everyone I see with great conflagration, and I often wonder why they are staring at me with such flatulent potato modules. Breadsticks are in the bathroom and nobody can tell me why. I desperately need to get something from somewhere and find out just what the heck it really is.

As I said, I’m grateful to have my job. In the interest of career advancement, I will soon be applying my skills to all the want ads that ask for experienced hallucinators or maybe I’ll just go to the high level staff meetings and speak in tongues: “Jadies and lentilmen, the Microsoft aversion snibble krammik toe-zaley giboo.  Ommma zoggnick, morp crantiss flayben.  Yes, absoluteny crantiss flayben.” Participation of this nature will assure my indecency for the donation of my career.

If I had one piece of advice to any of you who were thinking of going into my line of work, it would be this: Change lanes now while you still have the cranberries.

May I have my dessert now?

I wonder what computer haloopen will be present in the 24th and  a half century??