Baby Börn.

It's been a strange time of overt happiness for me this past week, the first week of my daughter's life. Like I don't even seem to care that my taxes, prepared 90 minutes before the deadline, have me owing over $9,000. Or that we gave notice on our beloved apartment and need to find a place by June 1. I guess it all takes a back seat for now.

I tried to take some contract work yesterday and it was a disaster. I was late to both appointments and couldn't do either job; I fumbled my way through and ended up just apologizing and leaving. On the way to the first appointment, I was trapped in a miles-long traffic jam on 295. The next exit wasn't for 10 miles, so traffic just sat there. People were turning off their engines and getting out of their cars to smoke cigarettes and stretch their legs on the median. Eventually I couldn't deal anymore and busted a U-turn across the steeply carved drainage median and found my way via county roads.

At my second appointment, I had to meet with a recruiter at a life insurance agency. He had slicked-back hair and smelled of sugarless gum. His office was festooned with successories and laminated "service pyramids". He looked a lot like Michael Scott and needed me to run wires through his office wall. He was wanting to connect his laptop with a new plasma TV to show powerpoint slides to his prospective recruits. Unfortunately I don't do in-wall wiring and so I told him I'd transfer the work order to someone else.

Then came the soft sell. He started to ask me questions about where I live and my family, angling for a policy sale. He fished out two creepy Lance Armstrong-style wristbands that said "LIFE HAPPENS" from a bulk bag of thousands, acknowledging that they might be "a bit big for the little one yet, ha ha ha."

I was frustrated and dazed when I left the insurance office and drove toward home. I was hungry and a Wendy's drew me into its drive-through. I got my food and drifted into the adjacent WalMart parking lot, shoring up next to a white Ford Windstar. I ate my food, shifting my focus between the Windstar, the Wendy's and the WalMart. I wondered why the Windstar had the word "Sport" splashed in teal across the front quarter panel. Maybe because it had alloy rims?

I wondered why the wristbands didn't say "DEATH HAPPENS" as I tossed them into the Wendy's bag with the detritus of my lunch, crumpled it up and headed home to see my baby girl.

Salad Bar Mitzvah.

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For my IT Guy job, I go all around the greater Portland, Maine area to retail and office locations as well as people's homes. Today I was sent out to a grocery store to fix this 42" plasma TV/computer setup that dangles from the ceiling above the store's salad bar.

The TV has a desktop PC bolted to the back of it and a black steel shell covering the PC, the whole streamlined mess suspended from a pole. The salad bar was near the meat counter, so when I arrived, I asked the meat person to page the store manager so I could check in and she did. "Amy Martino to the salad bar please." Suddenly, the poor woman at the meat counter was reamed a new anus by an assistant manager with a greasy comb-over.

"Don't EVER page the manager by their full name unless it's an emergency! That's the code for an emergency! It's 'MIZZ Martino' unless you're being robbed or you cut your hand off in the slicer... I swear to god, if you page the manager by their full name, you'll have four guys running over here preparing for an emergency!"

Then, presumably to call off the approaching mob, the comb-over guy snapped up the white phone and enunciated "MIZZ MARTINO... to the salad bar please... MIZZ Martino." The deli woman cocked her head and fidgeted with her ear. I wasn't sure if she was embarrassed for herself or for comb-over guy.

Anyway, the jobs were easy: remove the massive aerodynamic steel shell and replace some cables. Of course, until I fixed it, I didn't know what the screen would be displaying. I just perched on the stair ladder tinkering with wires and watching the weirdos parading through loading up their salad tubs with "salad," perhaps in the throes of a 2008 resolution. You know, salad-- pineapple rings, jello, pasta, croutons, dinner rolls, cheese, fruit medley, ranch dressing-- healthy stuff. Smashed into a gallon-sized tub, its top held on by rubber bands.

Maybe the vantage point of the stair ladder inflated my confidence, but I couldn't stop judging these people. I wanted to stop, but I couldn't. A goateed employee broke my trance. "LCD or plasma?"

"Sorry?"

"LCD or plasma?" this time nodding up toward the TV I was working on.

"Oh, ah, plasma."

"See, I want an LCD. My wife is making me wait a few more years cuz the price keeps coming down. 10 years ago one of them cost eight grand!" Then something caught his attention and he was gone.

As I worked, I reflected on the day before, and how I was completely out of money and had no gas in the car. I had ended up at a toll booth on I-95 without the $1.25 I needed to pass through. I rolled up to the guy and said "I don't have it!" He calmly wrote me a promissory note (!) and had me sign my name agreeing to mail $1.25 to the Maine Turnpike Authority within 5 days.

I felt so demoralized but was soon distracted by the fuel gauge dipping into uncharted territory. I was so sure that I was going to run out of gas that I was just running damage control, shutting down unnecessary drains on the electrical system-- stereo, headlights, GPS-- in an effort to get the last few meters out of what I had in the tank.

When I thought I felt the car lurching, I called 611 on my cell phone and had Sprint add roadside assistance to my monthly plan. I tried to sound nonchalant: "Hi, is there some sort of roadside assistance that Sprint offers? There is? Hmm, I think I might be interested in adding that today." The operator told me that in the event I ever need to use my new feature, all I need to do is dial #ROAD. Somehow I made it home without needing to.

Then, last night, I did some cash-in-hand Mac support for my film-maker friend David which allowed me to fill the tank with gas, maybe for the first time. I couldn't stop staring at the gas gauge after that. The needle looked so funny all the way up. I was so used to it being in the red or even below the red. I was hypnotized by it, smiling like an idiot.

These were my thoughts when the plasma screen came to life and I was snapped back into the moment, successful in my tinkering. The content on the screen was a bewildering arrangement of panels and frames displaying all kinds of information. Scrolling news, a slide show of supermarket specials, a tanned TV cook talking about lime zest. "I just love to use lime zest. Even when a recipe calls for lemon zest I use lime zest! When you're choosing your lime, choose the shiniest one. The shiniest lime will have the most juice."

Huh. OK. Well, that was fixed. So I wrapped the black shell back around the works and bolted it in place. I gathered up my tools and asked the poor meat woman if she'd please page Mizz Martino back to the salad bar and had her sign my completed work order.

Then, as I walked away I turned to look back at the salad bar. Several schlubs were gathered around smashing "salad" into their tubs, heads cocked up at the TV processing some amuont of the bombastic content. Maybe they were wondering what lime zest was.

I almost turned to leave, then was suddenly proud of what I'd accomplished. I came and fixed something that was broken and now these people were interacting with the thing. Though in the most banal sense, I was useful and felt like a real person. Just like with the gas gauge, I was hypnotized by the TV, smiling like an idiot.

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?"

You Want Your Cancer Meds WHEN?!?!

As a freelance "IT Guy" working part-time for a 3rd party dispatch service, I frequently pose as an employee of companies I've never heard of, at places I've never been for people I will never meet. That's all pretty awkward, but the hardest part to get used to is showing up at a place only to be faced with technology I've never laid hands-- or sometimes eyes-- on. In my life.

Yesterday I drove 40 miles out of town to a Rite-Aid to "replace a part in a printer," according to my work order. I showed up and identified myself to the nearest cashier as an employee of Silver Fox Solutions. I was asked to wait, then greeted by a pleasant, big-haired manager named Darlene who told me to follow her to the broken printer.

I was expecting to be taken to some crusty manager's office when Darlene dipped through the waist-high swinging door of the photo department and nodded at a large metal structure. She hooked her thumbs through the belt loops of her high-waisted jeans and said "There she be. Have fun." and dipped back into the store leaving the door swinging and me staring at the structure, blankly nodding my head.

It turned out that the monolith I was to service was the main digital imaging workstation for the photo department-- the thing that prints the customers' digital photos. I read through the PDF I was given when I accepted the job and the document took me through disassembly of the steel shell that housed the printer and the replacement of the faulty part.

After three hours, victory was mine when, suddenly, an entire roll of someone's pictures began to spit out one after the other-- a dozen or so flash-washed images of a house cat in various stages of repose on what must have been a new scratching post, Christmas tree in the background.

I'm trying not to get too stressed by the randomness of these jobs. I'm not about to lose sleep if I'm responsible for some fat-ass not getting his boring Christmas pictures back before New Year's day, but today I had to go fix some weird drug-dispensing tower at a hospital cancer ward.

Of course when I took the job I was merely told that I'd be troubleshooting a USB peripheral on a computer. In fact, the computer in question controlled a variety of "peripherals" including locks on two drug refrigerators and the doors and drawers of the giant drug-dispensing tower.

I introduced myself to the receptionist at the cancer ward as an employee of Generation Next, and when a nurse showed me to the drug tower, she assumed I was intimately familiar with not only the workings of "the system," but also its quirks. "Of course the fridge door takes forever to pop open once the system unlocks it, but you know how long we've been complaining about that."

The tower was loaded with drug vials with names like Cyclophosphamide and Mitomycin. The drugs are very expensive, she told me, up to $9,000 for a single dose. I was there because the drawers and doors of the tower no longer opened when "the system" told them to. I sized the whole shebang up and down with the nurse still standing there. I nodded slowly, gravely, with narrowed eyes, opening and closing the doors of the cabinet softly as if feeling for some tell-tale resistance in the hinges. "Mm-Hm..."

Once the nurse left me alone for a few minutes and I got a feel for how all of this equipment worked in concert, my panic subsided and I took notice of my immediate surroundings. There, taped to one of the drug refrigerators, was one of those "humorous" line drawings you'd see in a DMV cubicle or stuck to a cash register at a hole-in-the-wall auto parts store, or perhaps at a Rite-Aid photo department: a 10th generation photocopy of a guy falling on the ground and bursting into laughter saying "You want it When?!"

Wait, what?

"Excuse me, nurse? Can I please have my chemo?"
"When would you like that, sir?"
"Um, well, can I get it now? I mean I'm here and everything. And I'm dying and stuff"
"Wait... YOU WANT IT WHEN?! AHH-HA-HA-HA-HA"

Anyway, somehow I fixed the tower and got out of there. This job is so weird. I keep thinking one day the jig will be up.

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.

Teens in the 50's are a Thing of the Past.

Remember those filthy old computers I hauled out of the Jenny Craig? Well they're still in my car. Except one which I brought up into my apartment after scooping out the dander and human fur from inside. And what a diamond in the rough! Squirreled away in a safe place deep within the bowels of Windows 98 (first edition) was a folder chock full of personal MS Works documents.

Below is my favorite, in its entirety: a fascinating and meticulously-credited research paper entitled "Research Paper" that pulls no punches as it lays bare the differences between parents and teens of today and those of the mid-century.

In the 1950’s music consisted of mostly jazz, blues, and rock and roll. We still listen to those styles of music in 2005, but along with new music we have expanded our choices of style and have also expanded to new ways of listening to it. Being a teenager of 2005 is superior to being a teenager in the 1950’s because of the premium technology of CD players and IPods which have replaced the record player. The availability of these machines, where you can listen to the music, and what you can listen to has greatly improved since the 1950’s.

Records were 10-12 inches and easily breakable.(Gale, “45 RPM”) They sold for 4 to 5 dollars per record. CD’s are roughly 15 to 20 dollars each, but contain larger amounts of music and are a better quality. These CDs are much more compact than records are. The phonograph was a large piece of equipment as well. Because CD players can be quite small, it isn’t abnormal to seem them being stocked in local stores whereas a phonograph takes up a sizeable amount of room and was sold in very few stores. The internet has also helped the availability of CD players. In the 1950’s the internet was a thing of the future so phonographs couldn’t be advertised like CD players are now.

In the 1950’s listening to music was a family affair. The phonograph was usually like a piece of furniture. It was kept in the drawer of a cabinet in the living room inbetween the t.v. and a coffee table.(Pelham) The parents had control of when you were able to listen to music. Teenagers rarely had their own phonograph. The parents owned it and decided when you could or couldn’t play it. Their children wouldn’t be able to listen to music in their own bedrooms like teenagers today do. It is common for teens to own a stereo, walkman or even an ipod of their very own. This would allow teens to listen to music wherever they felt like, but teens of the 50’s were confined to listening to their parents music in their own living room.

Parents are more lenient with what they allow their children to listen to now than in the 50’s. As long as the parents of today don’t have to listen to what their children are listening to they don’t mind it. In the 50’s, since the phonograph was generally in the living room, parents had control over what their children listened to. If they didn’t like what they were listening to they just had to turn it off. If teens wanted to listen to something deemed inappropriate by their parents they wouldn’t be able to listen to it in the 50’s. The teens of 2005 have a better chance of listening to what they want to listen to with the technology provided. With headphones in their walkmans and ipods their parents would never know what they are listening to.

With the advantages of technology on the side of 2005’s teens it would be much better to be a teen now than one in the 50’s. CD players and CDs are much more available to teens now than in the 50’s. Today teens also have a larger variety of musical styles that they can listen to and with the invention of walkman they can listen to it wherever they’d like. Teens in the 50’s are a thing of the past.

*Results Not Typical.

I've been working sometimes for this weird tech support dispatch service. Calls come in via text messages and email and us registered techs sign into our "online office" and either accept or reject the jobs. There are a lot of techs and not a lot of jobs, so it's a scramble to get to the computer as fast as possible to claim the available work.

Recently I scored a gravy job (you might say) carting some old dander-riddled PCs from the sinister-looking meeting room of a Jenny Craig franchise in a nearby strip mall. If you haven't been to one, these "weight loss centers" are in a formal sense like gyms for sedentary optimists. Here, plump, shawl-clad "weight-loss consultants" tailor an eating regimen to allow clients to achieve their fantasy girth. All the trappings of a gym are present: duplicitous salespeople, unclear terms of service, memberships, managers, proprietary equipment, etc. Though I guess gyms don't have posters of Kirstie Alley everywhere.

Anyway, check out this photo I scored while there. These 'food portraits' are about 3 feet square in real life! Jenny's "product", that is, what the "consultants" are selling, is this weird food that is stored and sold on the premises. In fact, when I walked into the place I flashed back to the first time I walked into an Arby's (it was during a Minneapolis winter. I was a freshman in college and had just sold plasma next door and Arby's cashed the plasma checks but I digress). Wet cat food. That's the smell.