life, death, and an army of geeks

It's conventional wisdom -- there are only three things in life you can be sure of: Life, Death, and the need for a good geek when your computer runs amok.

My computer's hard-drive died a miserable death on Sunday, not long after I posted my weekly wrap-up. Poor ol' computer. Well, I didn't really consider it that old. It was only about 3 years. Maybe less. But in terms of technology, it was well dated and beyond it's life expectancy anyway. I never really liked it much -- it was a vicious monitor-eater from the start. H-P sent us no less than 3 new monitors (it may have actually been 4) over the course of the first year we owned it. But it eventually settled in and behaved itself after a serious purge of all systems including whatever was causing it to blow up monitors on a regular basis. Until the past several months, that is, when it was apt to do strange and unexpected things. Little did I realize that it was gasping it's last breath and warning me of the trouble ahead. If only I had listened closely, I would have heard the ominous words "back up your files NOW...."

Fortunately, I found me a good geek. Super geek, even. Potentially Geek Of the Year, nay, Century! I spied him while standing in line at the Best Buy Geek Squad Counter. There he was in all his dorky splendor -- tall, thin, dark hair in an ancient shag cut, glasses perched on his pointy noise, face covered with an entire batallion of zits, accentuated by the few strands of hair on his chin that he probably optimistically refers to as a goatee. It was love at first sight. I surveyed the crowd, scheming a quick and devious plan to make him mine all mine. I tapped the fella in front of me on the shoulder and pointed out a robust looking geek at the end of the counter "Psst, buddy -- that guy looks open". I turned to the woman next to me, who was obviously eyeing my geek and plotting her own schemes. "Hey lady, I think you can take care of that at the service desk". The wheels were in motion, I'd efficiently removed the competition, and when my geek-supreme lifted his head from his paperwork, I made direct eye contact and flashed him a winning smile. He blushed. He shuffled his feet and look at the floor and laughed nervously. He was mine!!!! I swooped in for the kill, and thrust my crippled CPU into his waiting arms. Ahhhh, sweet victory!

David -- yes, that was really his name! I told you, he was the PERFECT GEEK, no doubt born into this world with this divine purpose already predestined! -- deftly plugged his cables into my machine (um, er, is it getting warm in here?), and was instantly rewarded with the same message of death served on a blue screen that I'd been treated to at home. Aha, he exclaimed, sneaking a peek at me above the rim of his glasses, I fear it's a hardware problem. He admitted my wounded harddrive into his ICU ward for detailed diagnostics, jotted down my address and phone number between nervous chuckles, and promised to call me when he had an answer for me. I restrained myself from throwing my arms around his neck and giving him a big smooch on his clearasil-laden forehead, and trotted off to my friend's nearby house to breathlessly await his call.

I spent an hour or so plugging away at my friend's laptop that I had quickly developed a hate-hate relationship with. It was a bit of an antique and my lightening-fast typing seemed to be too much for it to handle. Actually, truth be known, I was probably unwittingly hitting something I didn't intend to as my fingers blazed across the keys. But the result was the same either way -- my cursor would inexplicably dance about the screen, landing bits of sentences in the most awkward of places. I swore a lot, I threatened the machine a bit, and I don't think my friend was too upset when my phone finally rang.

It was my geek-in-shining-armour, reporting the grim news to me. It was dead. It was totally dead. And only through the wonder of wizardly geekdom could he retrieve my now buried files from within the belly of the beast. He made a couple of suggestions, the most attractive of which was to come back in and pick myself out a nice new computer, after which he'd wield his magic geek-wand and extract my files from the land of the dead and transfer them to the new machine.

So off I trotted back to Best Buy. He saw me arrive, quickly ditched the teenaged surfer he was helping on a colleage, and took me to one side to whisper sweet nothings in my ear. Something about a sales flyer. And an upgrade. And operating systems. Or something like that. He left me, emotionally drained, in the hands of a salesperson as he dissappeared once again behind a curtain of black velvet. Or, you know, plastic. Whatever that was covering the door to the back room.

The sales dude and I got in some quality time. He was just geeky enough for my purposes and hooked me up with a sweet little Compaq laptop. I made sure that I could disable the touch pad (which was most likely what was getting me in trouble with my friend's laptop earlier), happily forked over my cash, and filled out all the paperwork I needed to for the data transfer. And then he brought me back over to my beloved David, who explained that he wasn't sure how long it would take to do the data transfer. The sales dude was pushing him to commit to having it done that night, but David nervously giggled and said there was just no way. The hard drive was dead. Dead I tell you! It wasn't even sustainable on life support. He was going to have to work for hours on it, days perhaps, probably invoking a spell at the full moon, and gathering a bat wing and an eye of newt in order to extract my files from the wretched corpse.

It did in fact take days. I called regularly for updates. I talked to a different geek each time. I'm pretty sure they were drawing straws to see who got stuck picking up my call when my number came up on caller ID. It was never David. He had forsaken me and moved on to some other damsel in distress with a less insidious problem. I suspect that some of the people I spoke with weren't even real geeks, but rather immitation geeks that they brought in to talk to annoying customers who just couldn't leave the real geeks alone long enough to do their jobs.

Finally, about the 297th time I called, the stout geek got on the phone and told me he was just now packaging up my laptop. It's ready to go home?? I couldn't believe my ears, it was like a dream. I don't remember the drive in, perhaps I was carried there on gossamer wings. But finally, at long last, my new baby was in my arms. I strapped it lovingly into the passenger seat, tossed the old dead beast in the back, and we drove off into the sunset to live happily ever after.

Or until something blows up.