Girls Want Guys With Skills

"I don't have any skills... nunchuck skills, bow-hunting skills, computer hacking skills."

I consider myself relatively adept at lots of stuff, computer software operation one of them. I mean, I'm not Steve Jobs, but I can figure out how to email attachments and run games made for Windows 3.11 on an XP machine. However, yesterday, I learned that my knowledge has been outstripped by people who program pop-up advertisements.

I'm trying to fill out my bar application, which would seem easy enough, except that Virginia has an electronic form wizard. Every ten seconds I get about 30 pop up messages which makes it virtually impossible to correctly inform Virginia about my speeding tickets, that time I mooned the Queen, my meth operations, and other such character flaws. I'm in the middle of cursing the names "Microsoft," "Compaq," "Online Casino," and "Free Nude Adult Cartoon" when I remember an email from the IT staff here at Vanderbilt offering to help with just such an occasion. Oh sweet salvation.

First, it's important to note that the IT staff has two office hours all day long, one in the morning and one in the late afternoon. Luckily, I fell squarely into the morning session so I made my way up to the third floor of the library.

For those of you who haven't dealt with the IT guys yet, they are a strange breed. They live in a very dark room with several television sets (all but one tuned to ESPN) and mysterious electronics piled everywhere. Outside their door is a doorbell that must be rung in order to get their attention. When this happens, the creatures inside turn their attention from Sports Center to the sole television that isn't on ESPN which happens to display the person who rang the doorbell. (I'd like to stop at this point just so you know that this is not an exageration... These guys have more security than David Duke at a rap concert. You'd think they housed nuclear secrets in that room.)

So, because I happened to be there between the magical hours of 8:30 and 9:30, I was granted entrance to the Tech Cave. I step in and am immediately ignored. After a few minutes, when the IT guys realize that their office decor won't scare me away one of them asks "what's up?" Now, in an attempt at fairness, this IT guy was a nice guy and I'm sure he had nothing to do with the Draconian nature of their policies.

Anyway, I drop off my computer, he says it'll take a couple of minutes. I arrive back in a couple of minutes, ring the door bell, gain entrance (probably through some top secret government researched facial recognition software) and am informed that it'll take an hour. Having already experienced the IT department's conception of time, I tell them I'll pick it up at 3.

2:30 roles around and I head back up to the IT department. When I get in I see the same guy working steadily on my computer. Now, I don't know if he happened to glance at the screen, see me coming and pulled a "look busy for the infidels," but he had me fooled. I felt sorry for the poor guy who was forced to deal with my computer's lack of lack of self restraint. (Apparently, my computer hung out with a bad crowd out there in cyberspace... I hate when a good computer goes bad).

At this point, I'm like "guy, break out the duct tape, it's only gotta last 3 weeks." I didn't care if it blows up on May 14, juice it up, give it the steroids, make it able to finish the season. At that point the Tech said "well, I got all of them but one, it should be ok to deal with." Cool.

Anyway, after something near 5 hours of working, my computer is down to a bearable amount of advertisements for uncensored adult anime and new offers. As of yet, I have been very happy with their work. So much so, I don't really begrudge those guys their ESPN.