I was a geek. I cannot help it, this was my lot in life. At least while I was working anyways. I was once a geekling, but then I became a much more proficient geek and so I guess even in retirement one could call me a full fledged geek person; although things are changing rapidly. I worked in computer support. This was the sad fact of life for me.

OK, yes I was very grateful I had a job that provided me with a good living. But sometimes the stress got to me and I tried to use toenail clippers for a shovel. One of my favorite examples of this was when our network croaked or maybe the internet died. Not exactly a happy time for the IT Department, because although things usually worked very wonderfully, things could and DID go wrong. This made the users sad and they called us. Many times. The phone rang a lot. There were several telephone calls. A whole lot of people were calling our phones. Somebody turn that stupid phone off. Is that thing ringing again?? Who the heck is that paging me?

And then there were 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 was on call I had to pay attention to e-mails from work and enjoy the happy indivisible dog food reflections. Then I came home and I actually had real life things to do!!

Sheesh!!

Stress would climb in the window and steam 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 had 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 were the refrains of all those poor souls who just wanted to get through the day with their computer behaving correctly; without any saturated animal crackers. To all of them I said with no electronic amplification: 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 was coping really well. Never mind the fact that I could smell strange colors and my ears could see flying pine trees in the pencil sharpener. I even learned to use magazines for socks. I surmised that nail polish would make excellent pudding. I tried to greet everyone I saw with great conflagration, and I often wondered why they stared at me with such flatulent potato modules. Breadsticks were in the bathroom and nobody could tell me why. I desperately needed to get something from somewhere and find out just what the heck it really is.

As I said, I was grateful to have my job. In the interest of career advancement, I decided to start applying my skills to all the want ads that ask for experienced hallucinators or maybe I’d 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 would certainly 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 IT as a line of work, it would be this: Change lanes now while you still have the cranberries.

Holy MOLY I’m happy to be retired. However, I still get the “opportunity” to help friends and family, and sometimes even complete strangers (who are no longer strangers) with computer issues.

May I have my dessert now?

Thank you.

With all this AI stuff, I sure hope nobody is too naughty with thieving drones…