On Household Technology

So, my husband is a software engineer working for a large company in Silicon Valley. This means that anything that even remotely might contain a chip is his domain. He admits to me being the real geek in the family, nevertheless he is in charge of fixing bugs and troubles as they arise in our household. I can already hear his complaints to this statement: I do not want to be that person, if you know how to fix it why don’t you do it yourself, I have my ways of doing things… etcetera. In any case, let me just say that we have this “spare laptop” at home, which was my previous one, and we only use for guests when they need to use email or in emergency situations. Said computer was quite slow (being old), and my husband’s solution to the slowness problem was “format C”. Now, I am a structural engineer, not a computer one, and although I might lack the subtleties of the information age, I can get as far as “format C”, and I opposed the solution- it sounded quite drastic to me, especially since the old laptop contained my entire iTunes collection! So, in brief, while I was gone for a consulting assignment abroad he decided that the time had come to re-format my hard drive without me protesting through it. Fine. Now, just about at the same time we could not figure out what happened, but he got himself cut out of the entire world outside of our house, without internet connection and impossible access to Skype or email to talk to me. 9 months later, my iTunes collection has still failed to materialize, leaving me with all the same songs and playlists as there were before I left the country.

So, since he's a "Format C" kind of guy, I have since given up asking him for advice on computer troubles, and either ask Google or Gug how to troubleshoot my issue- obviously without letting him know, or I could get into serious trouble!

Well, yesterday I had to give up my laptop for him to do some work, since his had a complete melt-down of sort. Today, as I went back, my computer was not happy- moaning and making noises and flashing me messages that said:

I don’t think my laptop likes him as much as I do. In any case, I had to reboot the computer, uninstall everything he had installed (for some reason, this happens EVERY TIME!), and click on the “yes” box, with the hanging effect that if I break my promise my computer will go into self-combustion….

Update: Complaints on the post, the statements here contained and the future of my technological home support have already materialized...