Miss Mom: My inner nerd

By the time you read this, I may or may not have a fully operational computer. The reason for that is that my son installed an evaluation copy of Windows 7, and that copy expired March 1. “No biggie,” I thought. “I’ve installed hardware and software before. I’ve reformatted my hard drive on several occasions to either reinstall an operating system or to simply dump bad memory brought on by a virus.” My little inner nerd was quite certain that this wouldn’t be a problem.

The problem is, is that my inner nerd carries the recessive, not-dominant gene in my psyche. Sure, it contains many of the factors that make for a good nerd: a complete book collection of Lord of the Rings (and the movies) and the Harry Potter series. This inner nerd has seen the entire original Star Trek series multiple times, as well as most of the follow up series and films. This inner nerd is also a gamer, starting with Pong as a child, and eventually maturing to WoW playing a mage. This inner nerd would far rather read a fantasy book then a romance novel, surf the web then watch tv. I even have a small box of cords that have no particular purpose, but may be useful for something some day.

It is times like these however that my inner nerve displays its recessive side most clearly. Every time I have to do a complete redo of my computer I hit snags. I always lose information when trying to save it, because I’ve never, in all the years I’ve done this, quite figured out how to save all the programs, or folders of pictures. Then there is the seemingly unsolvable issue, that requires me going to my friends, who possess more dominant genes for help. This time around, the piece of hardware that wirelessly detects my router, which allows me to connect to the internet is not working. Apparently it is missing something called a driver, which didn’t survive the system upgrade. I would have reloaded the driver, if there had been a way to do it. But this particular piece of hardware was supposed to be a plug and play. Meaning, I installed it, and it worked, no little CD of install data required.

My solution is to connect to the internet to install the driver. See the problem? I can’t connect to the internet! I may be able to do so connecting one of the kid’s laptops, but that is where I get lost in exactly how to do it. My inner nerd insists it would work, the non-nerd of me is clueless and just wants to sit and go into withdrawals over my lack of being able accessing my email.

But that’s not all, there’s more! My internet provider decided that I didn’t need internet access over the weekend. Now I am of the mind that part of the mission statement of internet providers everywhere is to see how far they can frustrate customers when calling for assistance. My company does so by disconnecting me for nefarious reasons on a Saturday, and then making sure that their offices are closed till Monday. Their direct competition has another tactic. They choose to stay open 24 hours, but farm out their help lines to people of whom English is not even their second language. For that we get to pay way too much, every single month, or until the next rate increase.

So how are you getting to read this column? One of two ways. I either had my problems fixed and I was able to get my computer status back to normal, or I am still in internet purgatory and I had used my flash drive to take this to a computer with internet access. I just hope the flash drive survived the dunking it got, not too long ago, when Helene’, the toy-strewing toddler, tossed it into my coffee.