Of Mice and Muchness

A lifetime ago, I went back to school to study computers. I was planning to be a network administrator. I got Microsoft certified, complete with a lapel pin and wallet ID card. Yes, I was actually a card-carrying geek.

I was pretty good at it, I think because it seemed intuitive to me. I did really well in school and on the Microsoft certification exams. Then I got sick with pneumonia, except it wasn't pneumonia. It was an MS exacerbation. Of course, I didn't know that then, since I wouldn't be diagnosed for another 4 years. Anyway, I missed so much time I had to leave mid-semester, and I just didn't go back.

I won't lie, it was hard on me. Really hard. I was working full time (my full-time week was anywhere from 45 to 60 hours a week), and going to school full time (3 nights a week for 4 hours a night). On school nights, my dinner was usually a Snickers bar and a diet Pepsi, with the occasional bag of Cheez-Its from the school's vending machines. I thought I was pulling it off, but my body had a different opinion.

At one time, I could pinpoint, or at least narrow down the cause of just about any computer issue. Click click click, the problem would usually be fixed. These days, because I'm so far removed from the land of computing, I'm at a loss when it comes to diagnosing and fixing problems. Even when I think I know, there's the lack of confidence factor. I just don't know anything about them anymore. I mean, when I went to school, I learned on Windows NT, Google wasn't a verb, Amazon only sold books, you paid for internet by the hour, and we were all impressed with our 56K modems. Things are a little different now.

My first computer had a 640-megabyte hard drive. Today, my DVR has 2 terabytes of storage. I installed my upgrade to Windows 3.1 from floppy disks. One year for our anniversary, I was so excited because my husband bought me a CD burner!! You probably have no idea how excited I was to get one and install it myself. I still remember opening the computer to configure the jumpers for hardware installation, or needing the installation floppy disk when you bought a new mouse. When Windows introduced plug-n-play, I was amazed and thrilled.

When I got a computer that had USB ports, it was another learning curve, the same as when I got a mouse with a scrolling button. My first mouse only had 2 buttons, no scrolling, and was connected through a serial port. Rather than it being optical, it had a ball inside that we used to have to take out and clean because it would get gunked up. With each new advancement for the computer, we were like cavemen discovering fire and seeing what we could do with it.

Now you sort of understand why I was at a loss when my son recently asked me to figure out why his computer was running so slow. I did what a reasonable person would do (for once), I called an expert. Lucky for me, my really really good friend is just such an expert. Or at least he was. But he still is, as far as I'm concerned. Anyway (boy, I sure interrupt myself a lot, don't I?), I listed all the things I tried, then took a guess at what I thought might be causing the lag. Turns out, I was on the right track but stopped short of actually executing the ideas. Like I said, I'm really unsure of myself these days when it comes to computers. Probably because I used to be much more muchier.