Cyber Dave To The Rescue

Despite the fact that I stare at a terminal screen all day, I'm not the expert on computers. I mess 'em up, in fact. That's why we have in-house desktop support at work places like mine. For people like me.

Nevertheless, when I travel to see my parents in Bay City, my father will sometimes seek my advice on his latest computer conundrum. Once he showed me a strange e-mail with an attachment sent to him by an acquaintance from Poland. He was reluctant to open the attachment, fearing it was a virus.

So I opened it for him. It WAS a virus. And within a week it merrily mailed itself to any address it found in my father's computer, addresses my father didn't even know he possessed. A college friend of mine from New York received an e-mail from my dad.

"Why is your dad sending me a virus?" my friend asked me in what-did-I-ever-do-to-him fashion.

My father was embarrassed, feeling that he had become the Typhoid Mary of cyberspace. He powered down his computer until a REAL computer expert came to repair things.

So this past weekend, my father asked me to fix a mailing roster he had tried to update to Microft Works on his Excel program. It appeared to me that his Excel and Microsoft Works documents had become transmogrified. Kind of like what happened after that guy and the fly went through the matter transporter together in the movie The Fly. Only my dad's document wasn't calling out, "Help me. Help me." But I'm sure it would have if it could.

I did extract enough information to compile a roster of some kind. But that was after I went into DOS mode in an attempt to copy and re-name the document, thinking that might help. But I mis-typed the command and hit return without thinking. The computer whirred to life, doing what I never found out. So I turned it off. Luckily, my father wasn't there to see that, so he doesn't know. (Well, I guess he does now).

Later, we both went to check out the new library that opened in town. Of course, it is well stocked with new computers. While I checked out the menus on one computer, my dad went to the one next door. Within a minute, he had it partially shut down. Stuck again.

I came over to try to revive it, but only managed to shut it down completely. And nothing I could do would turn the computer back on. A lady nearby asked if we needed help. When we said we weren't all that knowledgeable on the computers here, she said, "We all have just a little knowledge. It seems the more knowledge we have, the more problems we can cause."

Yep, I'm living proof of that.