A Mouse's best firend

If I could walk around with my computer strapped to my hip I probably would. I have a love hate relationship with this hunk of junk. It loves to hate me, and I hate to love it. It even has a name... Wanda. I know people name their cars and boats in hopes that they will bring them home safely. What’s my excuse?

I think I named mine solely for the purpose of having something to yell when it crashes. And believe you me, I can yell. I’m sure my neighbors sit around once a week and say something like, “Oh yes Bob, that girl’s computer just crashed again. Does her mother know she uses that kind of language? How shameful.”

So I spent the better part of this morning and yesterday morning trying to fix a friends computer. That’s always much more frustrating that dealing with my own for a few reasons: 1) People don’t know how to file things. It’s a wonder they can find their underwear in the morning without a map. 2) They sit there looking over your shoulder and asking highly technical questions. Now, attempting to learn new things is great, but that isn’t the best time for you to have your first lesson. 3) They are freaking out to the point that even their pets are hiding under tables. There’s nothing worse than working on someone’s computer and every little *ding* they hear gives them a stroke. 4) They always want to help. You sit there and watch them move their mouse at an excruciatingly slow pace, and it's all you can do not to shove them aside and confiscate it.

I’m sure they ask me for help because I’m really too much of a geek. I mean for the most part, these evil contraptions fascinate me. You’re probably sitting there thinking that you too are a geek. Well, unless you have random computer parts sitting on your kitchen table, you’re not a geek.

You’re not a real geek until you poke around in your open computer tower. Or instead of a normal collection like stamps or those state quarters, you collect MP3s. Ask yourself if you can tell me what a Sims character sounds like, or what it is like to get your ass kicked in some damn online game. Do you window shop at CompUSA only to salivate over a computer that could run a third world country?

I’m thinking one day I might become Queen of the Geek People. This would make my mother so proud of me I’m sure. All my little followers would know what an I-D-10-T error was. It would be apart of the Geek Manifesto. They also would count among their best friends, folks they’ve never met. We would probably never leave our homes. We would become a civilization of hermits that have tendinitis in their wrists from typing, and 20/300 vision from staring at a monitor all day.

The reality is that it’s an amazing world that you can get sucked into when you hop online. I bet you had no idea that you could meet such wonderful people, chat, read such entertaining fiction, learn so much about others and subjects you never thought you’d be interested in, and learn that it really isn’t the superficial that counts in the people you want in your life. Also, I bet you never thought you’d be able to say that yes, you too have met the Queen of the Geek People.

“To err is human, but to really foul things up requires a computer.” -- Farmers' Almanac