Tech support

I used to work for Lawn Doctor in Colorado Springs; at my interview, I was politely asked to demonstrate my ability to pick up a 50 pound bag of fertilizer and if I would be willing to be on the company softball team.

In the mornings, I would change out of my jeans and sparkly flip-flops into my Cintas uniform and black rubber boots, load up a half-ton of fertilizer and 48 gallons of weed spray, slather on a layer of sunscreen, fill up my water bottle, check all of my equipment, and head out in my company truck. My tan-lines were weird and I smelled awful at the end of every day; however, I loved my job and loved the people I worked for.

Sometimes, people would ask me questions about what they could do to have a nicer lawn. As this was in Colorado, where grass is not really meant to grow, the answer was almost always, "Water more."

I work in IT now. Most of what I do at work is concentrated in a small area of the computer world -- I am not a computer repair technician, or a data recovery specialist, or a network engineer. I am not technical support, dammit -- except, of course, to my mother.

My mother is a lovely woman. I love her. She is articulate; it is fair to say that the fundamental activity of her life is communication. Recently, through an unlucky series of click and clacks, she ran a program which completely fuckered up her laptop, rendering the operating system inoperable. This was described to me over the phone as, "Well, I can't get on the internet again." Perhaps I imagined the accusatory tone.

I went to her house to investigate. "There are new icons on your desktop -- did you download something or run a program you've never run before?"

"No. I didn't do anything."

After much awed wandering around, watching the computer do things I had never seen a computer do, I showed her a screen. "Have you ever seen this before?"

"Oh, yes, and I didn't understand what it meant, so I just had to pick something."

Clearly, in red letters, the computer had warned her that running this program could damage her computer irreparably, she should only proceed if she had exhausted all other possible avenues, she could lose all of her data, blah blah blah. "Did you READ this, Mom?"

"No."

Every time there is a problem, she despairs and has to be talked down from depositing the computer in the trash and going out to buy a new one.

Once, working on my father's computer -- he is less willing to ask for help, I found a laptop stuffed into a drawer. There would have been two, but he chucked that one against the wall before going out to buy its replacement. "What is this?"

"An old computer. You can have it, but I don't think it works."

There was nothing -- not a thing -- wrong with the computer.

I don't know what my point is, actually, or what this has to do with lawncare. Never mind.