in computers.

My computer is on the fritz, and I don't know what to do. I've tried all the things that I know how to do, including restarting, unplugging and replugging and then restarting, and shutting down and waiting ten seconds and then rebooting. At four years old, my computer is long past its warranty.

By the way, I'm "in computers."

What a dreaded phrase. As soon as someone hears what I do for a living, there is a roughly 53.1% chance that the person will say, "Oh, hey, you're in computers, how do you..." and then proceed to describe some problem that has nothing to do with what I do. I write software. More specifically, I write software for the transportation industry. So, really, I have no idea why your mouse freezes up sometimes or why Windows doesn't recognize a particular kind of file. Have you tried rebooting?

There are different types of computer people. I am a black box kind of girl. I don't know all that much about how a computer works, and unless I wrote the software, I don't know how any of that works either. Granted, I probably know more than the layman, because I did go to computer college, but I don't know enough to fix computers for a living. That isn't my job. There are computer people who know it all, either because they are just interested in taking that bad boy apart and seeing what it can do, or because they've worked tech support. Those are the people you want to ask for help. I can run tech support for my parents, but they just need to know how to do things like delete icons off the desktop or plug something into a USB slot.

So now I've got this computer problem, and though I could drop three hundred bucks for a new machine, I'm afraid that the problem is related to my hard drive. Since I want to be able to retrieve all my files from my current hard drive, getting a new machine could just mean infecting a new machine. It's quite a quandary. So I thought I'd ask some people at work if they had any insight into my issue, because, well, they're in computers. Without thinking about who would be the best person to ask, I asked the person that I know the best, Dave. He asked, "Have you tried rebooting?" I then admonished him for not being of more assistance, insisting, "But you're in computers!"

Then Rob walked in, and so we asked him. He then proceeded to tell me that the problem was probably not hard drive related, and started listing a whole slew of things that I could do, all of them relating to the parts of a computer that I know nothing about, some of them I'd never heard of. Apparently, Rob is one of those other kinds of computer people, the kind that doesn't just blink in confusion when the blue screen of death pops up. And if his suggestions do not work, I could probably persuade him to take my machine home and monkey with it. Worst case scenario: I have to buy a new machine, which is not so bad, because for one thing, I get a new computer. For another, I can afford it. Why?

Because I'm in computers.