If you're reading this, odds are that you're the family IT guy/gal as well.  Like me, I'll bet you field calls from all over the country about web browsers and email and spyware and viruses and the like.  And, God help you if you work for Microsoft because then even what is normally the last refuge of the family IT person ("Beats me.  You should call Microsoft.") is unavailable to you.

As mellow-harshing as it is helping Mom with her IM problem or Gramps with his email filtering rules, I have to say that my worst client by far is my wife.  Don't get me wrong; I love her dearly.  But make no mistake; she is the family IT guy's client from hell.

I actually think I could cope with her insistence on five 9s of uptime on her Dell laptop if it weren't for her persistent opposition to how I try to maintain that uptime.  For example, I'm pretty anal retentive about keeping all of the software on the family computers up to date.  For Helen, each of these regular tune ups is just another opportunity to break what she views as a perfectly functional computer.  Take this recent conversation, for example:

Steve: Clickity, clickity, click, click...
Helen: "GAAAAAAA! What are you doing??"
Steve: "Um, I'm updating your iTunes software."
Helen: "Why are you messing with that? Every time you update my computer it breaks for like two weeks."
Steve: "No, keeping your software up to date is actually what keeps it running reasonably reliably."
Helen: "No way! Every time you install those damn updates something breaks.  It's running fine, why don't you just leave it alone?"
Steve: "It's running fine precisely because I don't just leave it alone."
Helen: "Whatever.  Have fun.  I'm just going to use the computer in your office for, like, the next 19 hours straight."
Steve: Makes angry noises like Muttley.

When Helen's laptop appeared to go on the blink over the past week or so, you might say that she casually mentioned it to me once or twice.  You know, just in passing.  Anyway, as I tried to diagnose the issue, Helen watch carefully that I didn't make the problem worse with one of my hair-brained updates.

I'm not going to lie to you.  It felt pretty good to trace the problem to a slightly overheating wireless access point (small aside: of all things! imagine!) and point out that, once again, my much maligned updates were not the cause of her problems.  Some words may have been said at that time, possibly including something about "in your face" and "Flanders."

Anyhow, in the midst of this most recent conversation, it hit me: Helen isn't a computer expert, so she's looking for a causal relationship between *something* and her computer problems.  She a perfectly capable computer user, but she doesn't really know or care how they work.

Curiously, she didn't appreciate it when I pointed out the eerie similarities between her insight into the workings of her PC and cavepeople's insight into their world.  Cavepeople, for example, knew about the weather and how to deal with hot, cold, wet, or dry times of the year.  But they didn't know how the weather worked, so they probably operated in no small part on superstition.  The conversations may have gone something like this:

Thag: "Hmmm. Five large birds fly away from sun.  Mean snow come soon."
Grog: "Thank God it not six birds.  Me hate pterodactyl egg-size hail."

Helen demonstrated her appreciation for my keen observations here in her customary way, although more of the hitting seemed focused on the ribcage area this time.

I guess the moral of the story is that breaking a mirror will not only lead to seven years of bad luck, but its a surefire omen that a nearby hard drive is about to crash.