Who you gonna call?

I'm an excellent typist. And I know the rudiments of HTML as it applies to Blogger. Beyond that, I'm not a techie. I defered to others, to sort out techie problems. But things have been going seriously haywire with The B'Port News computer during the past week.

The computer's three years old. Way past warranty. We figured we'd have to take it back to where we bought it and they'd have to keep it for a certain period of time to fix it; but before we did that we found ourselves in the new Best Buy in Pearland, where we seriously thought about buying a cheapie CPU to tide us over while the main computer was getting fixed. That way we could do our biz email and check Bloggerville and the papers, if not much else, while the good computer was getting fixed.

When this was mentioned to the Best Buy salesman, instead of selling us a cheapie CPU, he said, "Let me take you over to the Geek Squad."

By this point, it's around 2 or 3 Friday afternoon. I never paid much attention to the Geek Squad commercials, but remembered vaguely that sometimes they rode around in VW bugs. It turns out the "agent" in the VW bug was busy that afternoon, so they dispatched a "double agent" from Central Intelligence, who drove his personal vehicle from Pearland to B'Port to fix our computer.

These agents, they dress like Mormon door-to-door preachers. Short-sleeve white shirt, black tie, black pants, white socks, black shoes. The guy shows up around 4:30 or so. He starts doing his thing, which I would explain to you if I could, but I can't, beyond saying he started doing lots of "scans" on the computer.

I went to the bedroom and took a nap. I had a headache. But first I had some milk and cookies. I slept, oh, maybe an hour, hour and a half. The headache was gone. "Is the Geek gone?" I asked. No, he wasn't.

So I went out to the family room, where the computer is set up so I can watch TV while I'm on the Net. The Geek was a nice guy. Turns out he spent some of his formative years in the very burgh in which we were sitting. When he was 9 years old, which was 15 years ago, his grandpa bought home a computer that Dow gave him as a retirement present. When his grandpa wasn't around, The Geek took it apart. Completely. The Geek was smart enough to take it apart in such a fashion as to see which parts went where when it was time to put back together. But before that happened, The Geek's grandpa came back into the room and said, "What on earth have you done!"

But, The Geek put the thing back together and it still worked. That's the way geeks are. It's some kinda gift they're born with. God bless 'em.

Anyhow, long story short, The Geek was in our home til 10 o'clock that night. I watched the Astros-Pirates game while he worked. He accepted an offer of some iced tea, but declined the offer of clam chowder and/or chicken noodle soup, purchased earlier that day at the fab new Panera Bread in P'land.

He didn't complain a bit, but it was clear that our computer's problems were more than he bargained for. No hardware problems, but massive spyware and virus stuff. He had to "manually remove" a buncha stuff from the register, and he appeared momentarily to be sweating out the completion of the whole process, maybe since his wife called a couple times, and his brother in-law called a couple times. But, as he told his wife, they were paying him overtime, and he apparently could use the dough cause he's going to college, besides being a Geek Squad double agent.

Anyway, the computer's working great. I figure we got more than our money's worth, considering all the time he spent here, and we didn't have to buy a cheapie CPU as a backup. And I got to hear the life story of a Geek. So, if you're not a techie (like me) and you're up against it, consider calling The Geek Squad. The house call cost $229.