SuperGeek can solve any computer problem instantly with just a key stroke. SuperGeek knows what the afflicted are trying to tell him even if they don't speak Geekese. SuperGeek to the rescue. YES!



In case you're wondering, I've just spent six weeks in computer hell. I want to believe in SuperGeek.

At first, it was "just" that my screen would freeze at increasingly inopportune times. More and more of my work got lost in these little computer Alzheimer's moments. I did what most of us not born at a keyboard do when the computer gets weird. I pretended it was a fluke.

Wrong. It happened again. And again and again and again.

I admitted I needed help and called my kid. He is very smart about computers. I'm careful with what I download and have a good security set up, but still he discovered way too much nasty stuff that I had somehow let in. Spyware. Viruses. A trojan horse. A root kit. (Sounds like it belongs at the dentist's office.) He spent an entire evening cleaning it all up. An evening he didn't have. I was very grateful. And technologically whole again, right?

Wrong. The same things happened again, only now I also had this irritating little gerbil sound when I used the touch pad. My son has a real job that was eating him alive. He didn't have time to be my SuperGeek. He gave me the name of a good repair shop. (This may have been SuperGeek in itself because good computer repair shops are really hard to find.) I took it in and they fixed it.

Not. They are good guys and told me to bring it back in for free when I told them the problem was still there. They worked on it again. They were even more convinced that we'd solved the problem.

Nope. By now I was feeling like I'd been evicted from my childhood home. Trying to get work done had become an exercise in futility. I felt vulnerable. I felt stupid. I felt at the mercy of other people who had way too many other things to do. I felt like the Computer Gods were, for some reason, really peeved with me.

The repair guys were frustrated, too. But they handled it better. They told me to bring it back again. I did. They worked on it again--at no additional cost, bless them. The hard drive finally got weird enough that they could see it was the problem and fixed it. Ah, back to normal.

Not at all. My data had disappeared.

Not really, but it was pretty elusive with where it went. They knew more about where to look. All I knew was panic. They got that fixed and coached me on how to deal with transferring what I needed to where I could find it easily. SuperGeek? Close for sure.

Once we finally got the computer problems solved, a whole new raft of difficulties cropped up with the ISP. I won't go into details, but I promise you those guys are NOT SuperGeek. I spent over a week trying thing after thing to get my internet access and e-mail back to where I could use it.

But an interesting thing happened at that point. I finally started to understand what my son has been trying to tell me for years. NO ONE can fix a computer with a keystroke when something major goes wrong. And most of what the wonder geeks can do comes from the ability to try again and again and again. Their patience is astounding. Also something I need to emulate.

Instead of throwing up my hands and crying for SuperGeek, I need to knuckle down and go to work to figure out what's not working. I will never be able to fix the kind of thing that was the problem that created this nightmare. But I did get to where I could fix a good many things that I'd been waiting for SuperGeek to handle before.

It takes patience. And a willingness to be wrong--and lost--that is probably more foreign than a motherboard to the boomer generation I claim as mine. But I can learn this. There is no SuperGeek. I can live with that. You can, too. Really.

Copyright (c) 2009 Mary Lloyd