On Living with a Computer Guy

I feel sorry for my wife, but it’s her fault for marrying a computer guy.

I’ve told her that if she married and astronomer, there would be a telescope in every room. “Why do we need another telescope, tell me that: dear,” she would say, and I’d shrug my shoulders and say, “Well, how could I not buy it! It’s a XXX for only $$$, and I just had to have it.”

We don’t have telescopes all over the place but we do have computer stuff. Stuff is an abstract word, but it refers to PCs (which I refer to as boxes), hard drives, computer cables, CAT-5 cables, boxes of hundreds of black cables all intertwined, boxes of cards – graphics cards, Network cards, USB cards – all green printed-circuit-board like and with silver this and that sticking out of them, as well as flat screen monitors I get at the Thrifty Shopper and store under the kids beds, and the list has only begun.

I tell her it’s all important and, when I get a PC from someplace – whether an old one from work, or one I find on the curb (yes, I have picked up a few off the curb) or at a garage sale or when my ever-so-kind relatives give me a trove – I usually cannibalize it. Cannibalize means that I rip out all the useful components, all the graphics cards and RAM (if not too old), and I can always use an extra hard drive and the sound cards sometimes come in handy etc. etc. etc.

So I have pieces everywhere, and I do try to organize them but there’s a lot, and who has the time?

So we live with it. Or I should say she lives with it.

I have redeemed myself. I had about twenty dead PCs on our old pool deck last spring, as well as five to seven old laptops and two or three printers, and when there was a Computer Recycling Drive in Weedsport last year, I loaded up my entire van – the entire thing, with just me in it – I mean my entire van, from floor to ceiling including the seats – and drove all these dead computer shells and wrecks that had sat out in the snow and rain for months under the menacing Central New York sky– I drove all these to the Computer Recycling Drive and parted with them forever.

Like mice that always seem to find a way back into the house, so did computer PCs and green PCI Express cards and monitors with only a scratch here and there and hard drives galore plus all the cables for everything – you know, computer stuff – and now the old pool deck has another stack of old, deceased, metal-cold and sometimes soaked hardware. So again it will be off to the recycling center this summer, and good riddance for many in my family.

But I’m a computer guy, and what do you expect? If you want sanity, marry a gardener or a manager of an IGA store or a boring accountant, or something. Don’t marry a computer guy. I often say that my kids are smart enough not to follow in my steps. It is so. But I have followed what some refer to as a line-of-work, but I consider more of a mental illness. That is also so. All I can say is that I’ve given those dear ones I live with awesome internet and fast PCs and printers that print like a dream, and scanning capability when they need it and we can fax too, and I might mention no telescopes, and what more could they want?