Two Dads and a Motherboard.

I have an odd job, I really do. I work part time for a national tech-support dispatch service and jobs get routed to the pool of nearby technicians via email and text messages. When the text or email shows up on my phone, I scramble to get to a computer and log into my account and accept the job before anyone else does. Sometimes I get it, sometimes I don't.

The job can be either commercial or residential. If it's residential, I usually go to someone's weird house in god-knows-what suburb. In any case, I am required to represent whatever company is sourcing me that day (e.g. CompUSA, Acer, Dell). It's hard to remember who I'm representing on any given visit, so it becomes "Hello, my name is Nick and I'm with (slowly scan work order in hand) "International Laser." Smile.

Today I drove to Lebanon, Maine, near the New Hampshire border. Maine has all kinds of cities named after foreign places. A quick look at the map reveals names like: China, Lebanon, Vienna, Lisbon, Peru, Wales, Mexico, Sidney, Palermo, Paris, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Naples, Madrid, Belfast, etc.

Anyway, today I drove to Lebanon and met with an old queen named Ron who had a dead computer which he professed to having bought at "Walmart's." Ron had the patina of a serious lifetime smoker. He had 'smoker's hair', 'smoker's face', and a shredded voice. He wore black jeans, a tucked-in mock-turtleneck and a studded black belt. Ron lived with his partner Steven (another tense, white-bread Mainer) and an adopted Pakistani teenager, a boy named Rahesh.

Rahesh had only a Maine accent and was called on to figure out the basement lighting. That's where the computer was. His two dads snapped at one another upstairs while I got to work dismantling the PC. "I said 'can you pour me a soda?'!"

"You just had a soda!"

They were preparing something in the kitchen for their Christmas dinner and the entire house including the basement smelled like bagel dogs. My job was to replace Ron's motherboard, which I did, and as I waited for the computer to start back up, I looked around and really drank in the scene for the first time. Shelves and shelves of antique bibles, several dozen VHS tapes including a 2-tape set of My Fair Lady, several books on sexuality and a few really old sets of philosophy books, spanning dozens of volumes, on unfinished plywood shelves.

The basement was done up in wainscoting and brown shag, severely torn in places. Several dusty museum-ready stereo components were lined up on a low, lacquered entertainment center: an audio cassette deck, an early CD player, a turntable, a receiver. I began the final steps of reassembling the PC so I could get out of there.

Then the dads started in again: "Did you turn my oven down!?"

"Yes! Do you want the outside to burn before the inside's even cooked?"

I felt sorry for Rahesh, then felt guilty for feeling sorry for him. He's just a teenager with parents like anyone else. As long as the three of them love each other, it doesn't matter how weird Ron's skin is or if they are having burned or raw bagel dogs for Christmas. Then I felt a little bit happy for them.

I got Ron's elaborate signature on a few forms and wished them all a happy holiday. As I left the house, they were all filing down to the basement, as a family, to check out the fixed computer. I wondered what they'd do, gathered around the computer. I imagined them browsing to a sports website or maybe the dads would check a joint email account. I have to admit, I felt useful. Which is rare.