Nerd Spray.

Sometimes, my IT Guy job is hard. But sometimes I show up on site and there's nothing for me to do. Whatever the problem was has vanished. This frequently happens with printers. One of my first support calls was to a place that printed paychecks; both of their paycheck printers were broken. When I arrived, the printers were humming along nicely and there was apparently nothing that needed attention.

The woman in charge of the print room had fixed them by installing "maintenance kits" which was already about as much as I would ever know how to do. She was glad I was there anyway. "Well, now that you're here, maybe you could go through and do a preventive maintenance on these machines just to keep us going as long as possible."

I figured I might as well do something so I could say I was there and get paid for the call. All I could think to do was to get out my can of compressed air, open the hatches on the sides of the printers and thoughtfully spritz some air into the works.

My girlfriend calls it Nerd Spray. I made a point of getting the most industrial-looking brand at the electronics store here in Portland. The can is huge. It commands respect.

Yesterday I was sent to a local heat oil company to service a $7,000 Printronix "line matrix printer," the thing they use to print people's power bills. That's it up there on the left. When I arrived I was shown to the printer which was spitting out power bills at a steady pace. The error message on the screen that was called in had disappeared several hours ago. Out comes the Nerd Spray.

I got $80 for that call and $120 for the call to the paycheck place. It offsets days like today: I drive 90 minutes each way to New Hampshire, spending $25 on gas and tolls in order to swap someone's CD drive in their home PC for $45. And then on they way home, about to run out of gas, I slap down the last 4 quarters to my name on the counter of an off-ramp gas station "Put these on 3," as if I'm betting on a horse.

The downside is that the Nerd Spray jobs engender a different kind of stress, almost worse than the stress of "will I be able to fix this thing." It becomes "will I be able to pretend I know some advanced IT voodoo and put a curse on this thing so it won't break again in the next 24 hours?"