Mark's Bug

I can hear the cursing, and whining, wafting through the house like smoke from a fire, but there is no fire. It's Mark, totally frustrated and crazed, trying to cope with his computer. He's picked up a virus again. This time he swears that all he did was visit facebook, and click on a link someone had put in there. Even though Mark worked in information services for years, and was responsible for keeping the Broward Courthouse computer system running, his first instinct is always to come running to me for help.

For twenty five years I maintained other people's computers, and although sometimes it was extremely satisfying, at other times I wanted to kill someone. It never failed that on a Saturday night, when I wanted to go out, my pager would go off and I would have to drop everything to go fix a crashed computer system. This invariably caused me to stomp around the house in a fit of rage, shouting, and screaming every foul, mean, and filthy word I could spit out. That generally worked out okay, because it meant that I would get all of the hostility out of my system before I showed up in the customers computer room. To this day my friend Dennis thinks I had a customer named 'Southeast Frozen F*cking Foods'. Getting my hostilities out before showing up usually worked fine, except for the one time I lost my temper at a customer site, and let out a 'F' bomb. I was quite surprised to find out that you could be fired for swearing in front of a customer.

I really don't mind fixing Mark's computer. I don't have to leave the house to do it. I can get to it in my own sweet time, and I always get a good meal out of it. Most of all, I can sit there and call his computer all kind of nasty things, and nobody is going to tell me not to.