Geek Squad

Dear Wally:

My computer just died. Help!
-Distraught

Dear Distraught:
Let me share a recent personal diary entry that might help:
Dear Geek Squad: I’ll never make fun of you again if you can get my computer to turn on. Last night while I was working, it died on me. Bam. Gone. Black screen. No warnings, no apologies. I tried smacking, rebooting, yelling, and then I tried beer. I went through Kubler-Ross’s five stages of death and now I’m at acceptance. Except I’m not really because I cling to a sliver of hope: You.
Today I’m at your formica counter, hat in hand. I am biting my tongue for all the snotty, mean things I could easily say about your skinny black tie and greasy hair (and thick glasses held together by electrical tape, tucked in shirt, shiny shoes, Sears ‘toughskin’ black slacks and knowing smug smile) --the way you ride the back of the consumer electronics giant BestBuy like a sycophantic, scrap-nibbling remora—things I usually say behind your back.
I will say none of these things because right now, I am your bee-atch. But I’ll go one further: If you retrieve my data (some of which includes an essay making fun of you), I’ll never ever again make fun of ANYONE in the tech customer support business, no matter how homely they are, no matter how much they look like they are guiding Apollo 13 to the moon from Houston 50 years too late.
Make this deal with me now, and your cousins at Verizon who delight in flummoxing me and your cable TV brethren who revel in tardiness (and who never have the right part in their truck) will all be safe from my invective from hereon in. So long as you hook up your gizmo and breath life back into my computer, I’ll do you that solid and you will know that at least one voice in a mocking sea of gazillions has been silenced. OK? Be a hero to your people.
Take my computer and caress it with your magic hands on that static-proof bench over there while I fidget nervously. Admire its ram or gigs. Have your way with it. My life is in your hands. My entire past and my entire future.
You behind that counter. Me at your mercy. It’s a dynamic I do not enjoy. I damn everyone in your profession under my breath. I nervously look at the clock and then the rate card ($95/hr) and then the clock again. You decide that it’s sloth time and that revenge, while best served cold, is also a dish best served slowly (at $95/ hr). On the clock, you admire the bag I brought the laptop in- the same bag the BestBuy ‘hostess’ thinks I’m gonna use to steal small consumer electronics. I shift my weight uneasily , trying to tell you with body language that the ‘fix,’ if there is one, is not with my leather bag.
I feel my life savings run through the sieve of your skinny, Darwinian-advanced, capacitor-gripping fingers. There goes this month’s rent! We sail past the unspoken initial, free 10 minute rule, wherein, if you Geek Squaders can fix it, there’s no charge. No sir, that won’t be my fate.
I’m doomed.
Soon I’ll own a useless $450 laptop that cost me $5000 to not fix.
“No boot device, you say?” My words sound hollow. “What’s that mean? Is that good or bad?”
“Wait… either very good or very bad? I think I need to throw up.”
You point over your shoulder at the black curtain that shields the secret room and tell me you are going to have to ‘take it in the back.’
“Well that makes two of us,” I joke.
No Smiles.
You, wizard, step slowly ($95/hr) backwards and disappear, mumbling the words “I’ll be right back.” The black curtain swallows you up. A loved one off to the operating room. I pace the cold tiles.
I have time.
I find myself drifting towards the beeping, clanging lure of new equipment that flanks me in the enormous store. Somehow I arrive, unawares, at the new laptop section. Is this chance? Infidelity? I doubt I’m anything other than pawn in this heady game. I’ve follow the carpeted path that the plump statisticians and marketing cerebrums have conjured.
And then I hear your voice float over the store. You hold my laptop open, splayed casually yet firmly (like the unfortunate frog that we dissected in 6th grade that was pinned to a wax bed) in one arm. I see the familiar cerulean blue desktop. My palm tree, escapism screensaver sways. I see my past, my future. It’s so beautiful I could cry.
Come to poppa!
“How much am I in for?” I ask, garishly trolling the commercial. I need to immediately buoy the bad with the good.
“No charge.”
“What? No charge? Mock me not SuperGeek or I’ll set a Level 7 Gorgon on you…”
“It was an easy fix. Just needed to relocate the hard drive. You got lucky, pal.”
“I …I love you. No, I’m serious. I LOVE YOU. And I will never make fun of Geek Squaders again. Never!
So he says, “Well, make sure next time you remember to back up.”
And I get one last one in, because I can’t help it: “You mean back up in my dorky little black and white VW bug mobile-service-pod?” (Hee hee).

So Distraught—Get to Bestbuy and find the Geek Squad in the back. (They have the skinny black ties and thick glasses). And keep your fingers crossed!
-AllyWa (PigLatin code for me, in case I ever need to use GeekSquad again!)
(Need a question answered or someone to take your laptop to Geek Squad? Email our advice columnist at cwn4@aol.com or visit his blog at blogger.com)