A few entries back I talked about how I am the Computer God for my family. I am, however, a god who gets no respect.

I should preface this by saying that what I’m about to bitch about doesn’t just happen with my family. But it happened with my family this time. Hence the bitching.

Listen up, computer neophytes. When I bestow my blessed wisdom upon you, what the fuck are you thinking when you question me? When you decide you’re smarter than me? When you try to second guess me? Are you out of your tiny little pea-brained minds???

Time and time again, it happens: Someone needs help installing something or moving something or copying something or de-oopsing something or doing some dirt-basic bit of computer usage that is light years beyond their personal capabilities. And they call me for help — but never just when the problem happens, when they’re at their computer, with the error on the screen. No, they have to wait until 10:30 at night, when they’re in the car on the way to a I Don’t Know What The Fuck To Do meeting or something and they simply don’t have time to talk right now but could I tell them how to fix it in 30 seconds while they’re only half paying attention and trying to change lanes while looking for a CD in the back seat? And I do tell them in 30 seconds or less how to fix it, and they hang up, and then they call me 10 days later with the problem still unaddressed but wondering if maybe this other brill-fucking-iant idea they came up with all by themselves to fix it a different way (that won’t even come close to working and will in fact fuck things up even worse) will work.

Because, you know, maybe I — the guy they call every time they’re having computer trouble, the guy who always fixes their messes, the guy who talks them through whatever the issue is when they call when I’m having dinner, the guy they acknowledge as being the family Computer God — maybe I lost my fucking mind and went stupid and they know better than me after all. And they’re running their I-know-better-than-you idea by me, the guy they know better than, to see if they really do know better than me!!!

Un-fucking-believable. I help them and they turn around and question me. The fools are tugging on Superman’s cape. They know not what they do. Pearls before swine. Etcetera.

Sometimes I just want to smite them.

I just got finished having a conversation with a guy with a lazy eye and I have no idea what we talked about. My mouth was on conversational autopilot while all my brain-power went to trying to figure out which eye I should be looking at.

I never did pick one, so I spent the whole conversation switching back and forth from one eye to the other. I felt like a friggin’ nystagmus sufferer. The thing is, the guy had to notice all the nervous eye-switching and know that I was trying to act all casual about his lazy eye, only it wasn’t casual because I couldn’t figure out which eye to look at, which was just calling even more attention to the lazy eye that I was trying not to call attention to, which made me even more uncomfortable and made my nystagmus thing even more frantic. Oy.

At first I felt badly about it, but now I’m just mad. At him. He knows he has a lazy eye and knows it’s an issue for the people talking to him — he has to know, he sees the nervous eye-switching all day long. He should be helping us out, not leave us to figure it out on our own.

I think a big tattoo on his cheek would do nicely, something like “Use This One” in big letters with a huge red arrow pointing at the good eye. Or maybe an eye patch. But come on, give us something!