Down at the corner of Geek and Nerd

This apartment hosts two laptops, two desktops, four cell phones and a PDA.

I have a Treo and a Pocket PC that Geekfarm signed out to me. I also have my laptop and personal cell and old moldy win98 desktop. The Treo plus a PDA would seem to be overkill, but the PDA was solely for the purpose of bossgeek “beaming” his notes to me from his PDA so I can then invoice people for the hours he spent anti-virusing and updating and installing stuff.

Of course, the Pocket PC and Treo do not speak to my Powerbook. They do speak to my personal cell in Bluetooth, however, and to each other. Roommate’s laptop doesn’t talk to anyone, so far as I can tell, nor does his antiquated desktop.

I’m having to put my head back into geek mode, and also into helpdesk mode — a customer brought in her desktop today saying it wasn’t booting, but was putting horizontal red lines on the screen. Of course, my first thought is, that’s a display problem - and the pc booted fine and displayed fine. And then I thought, I ought to run antivirus — then promptly got involved with three other tasks, and wala! the customer comes back, and I explain, and she says she’s going to pick up a flatscreen LCD and that should fix the problem. And then as an afterthought, she asks about a message that pops up about windows backdoor.

Ooooooh, should have run that antivirus. Because messages don’t pop up about the actual windows backdoor that’s part of windows, and there are trojans with ‘backdoor’ in the name.

It figures that after I spend thousands of dollars on an education in my ideal career, I can’t find work, or even a good volunteer gig, in that field - and then find a decent job in a different career path I’d given up on. AAAARG. I’m so far behind in geekery that I feel pretty dumb listening to the guys talk in shorthand about networking crap.