“Fran, I have a virus,” I told my friend over the phone.
“And here we had this whole discussion about you not sleeping with Cami.”
“No. It’s my laptop.”
“Oh. Bummer.”
“Well, you’re some kind of a tech guy. What do I do? I can’t open a single program. I have an ever growing stack of windows telling me my machine is fucked and that I need to pay a hefty ransom to unfuck it.”
“Sounds like you need to wipe the drive.”
“Not cool. All my notes and all my pr0n? No way.”
“You’re not backing all that stuff up?”
“Backing up to what? The CNC servers? That’s not an option for me anymore. I’ve got this Talking Heads thing coming up, and I need to do my homework. I’m thinking of just paying these scammer guys off to get my machine back.”
“Don’t embolden the enemy. You never negotiate with cyber-terrorists. And we need to have a discussion about external hard drives by the way. Bring it on over, and I’ll see what I can do. I set up a web cam to watch that nefarious traffic light, so I’ve had some more time on my hands lately.”
“I’m coming right over then.”
“We’ll back up your notes and… prawn before we hose the system. You have your recovery discs, right?”
“I hope I can find them.”
“I might be able to fix it even if you can’t find the discs. What’s prawn? You have some giant shrimp on your system?”
“Okay, now I’m really freaking out. Maybe I should call the nerd squad.”
“Save your money, Shel. Don’t let me miss this opportunity to be the guy with the answers.”
Whenever I had a computer related issue at CNC, I’d always check with Fran first, and he usually knew what to do. Every now and then Fran would be stumped though, so I would turn to this kid in the IT department, Yevgeny. Yevgeny never failed. He could hack himself out of the Amazon rain forest in five seconds. Yevgeny had this horribly condescending bedside manner. He was literally dumbfounded every time I did not know the solution to my technological problem. He would shake his head with a smile of disgust as he remedied whatever ailed my machine. “Sheldon, all you have to do is a simple registry edit. A child could do this.” Yevgeny was my last resort.
In my current situation, I wanted to call Yevgeny immediately. I decided instead to avoid certain humiliation and let Fran have a crack at it.
The slow traffic over to the Wilkinson house surprisingly helped to calm my mood a bit. I had time to ponder a Plan B. I’d actually already absorbed a quite a few of the elevator speeches and dossiers I had prepared for various prospective clients. I had generic talking points for those with whom I was unfamiliar. And then I realized at that point I was a salesman. I was selling the Nell Tanner brand, and the exclusive product was I. By missing the notes too much, I was becoming what I despised. This guy likes to golf. That guy likes to make fishing flies. So fucking what, I say. I’m not going to kiss your ass. You’re going to kiss mine and beg me to motivate your people into producing more profit for you. I’ll take your money, and then I’ll tell your people how they can take your money too.
“I’m a little worried about you working on this, Fran. This seems like one of those things that could cause your blood pressure to spike.”
I probably shouldn’t have said that with Mel in the room. If she had a gun in her hand at that moment, she might have used it on me. Fran laughed it off.
“There is nothing to worry about. Besides, my medication keeps everything in check.”
“Fran, the minute I hear a cuss word out you, that’s it. Sheldon and his computer will have to leave,” threatened Mel.
“The bad words actually help relieve pain and stress. I read that somewhere. I would be more worried if he weren’t cussing up a storm. In fact, Fran, you should try to cuss at least a hundred times a day. It could really work wonders.”
“You show me that article, Sheldon,” Mel ordered.
“As soon as Fran gets my laptop working again, I promise I will.”
Eating up that conundrum, Mel left the room saying, “I’m baking cookies for you, Sheldon, and you’re going to put him through this?”
“I’ll only eat the cookies if he makes it through to the other side of this ordeal.”
I set the laptop on the table, opened the lid, and pressed the power button. The machine whirred to life, and shortly after, a message on the screen prompted me to log on. I typed in my credentials and waited. Within a few seconds the first window popped up urging me to deal with the incredible number of infections, discovered festering in my operating system, by downloading the latest and greatest virus-killing software. Closing the window only caused another to pop up in its place. Trying to open any application was fruitless. The moment of truth came when Fran attempted to open the running task manager.
“If we can open this, we can hopefully at least stop the virus from keeping you from running your programs.”
Fran couldn’t open it. He wanted to say, “Fuck.” Instead he said, “Let me try booting up in safe mode.”
Then came another unspoken F-bomb moment after a minute or so of restarting the machine. “We can’t log in as an administrator.”
“Fran, I don’t know what that means.”
He just stared at the screen. I couldn’t tell if he was about to scream or cry.
“We should call Yevgeny, Shel.”
In my head, I went through a checklist of all the bits and bytes that would soon disappear. I handed Fran the startup discs.
“You know, Fran… half the fun of pr0n is tracking it down in the first place.”
“You sure you want to do this?” The pall of despair gently lifted from Fran.
“Do it.”
Fran suddenly found a surge of energy. “I’m not ready to give up just yet.”
He booted from the disc and attempted to repair the operating system. That didn’t work. He downloaded and ran a virus cleaner utility, which turned out to be a Trojan horse for another virus. Fran scoured the web, and eventually he discovered the trick to getting my data back. We drove down to the electronics store and bought a small hard drive enclosure to change the one in my machine from an internal drive to external drive—that’s how Fran explained it to me. He pulled the drive out of my laptop and inserted it into the enclosure. He plugged the now external drive into his computer and pulled off the files I needed. He put the drive back in my laptop. Then he erased it and reinstalled the operating system. And he did it all without making me wear a dunce cap and sit in the corner.
“Good show, old chap. Since you’re still standing, it looks like I’ll get to eat those cookies after all, although it puts me deeper in debt to you.”
“This may sound a little weird, Shel, but I want to thank you actually. I love retirement, but I also like helping my friends out. It makes me feel useful.”
“Well, in that case, maybe you can hear me out on where I think my prick is headed.”
Fran received the additional four-eleven on the lovely Carla Diaz. He didn’t hesitate with his advice.
“It really doesn’t matter if she’s a mom or not. If you dig her, then you dig her, and you make everything else fit.”
“I dug my ex-wife.”
“Yeah, people are going to change, and you can never tell quite where they’re going to go. I think seeing into the future would have a devastating effect on your soul. Think of all the wonderful experiences you would have let pass by just because you knew the relationship would end badly. You know for Mel and me, both sides of our family were against our relationship at first.”
“Well, I could understand her side’s perspective.”
“Sure. A crazy protestant hood like me. That was pretty frightening to an Irish Catholic family like Mel’s.”
“I love how organized religion brings us all together. And when I say, ‘Us,’ I’m referring to everyone who believes the same thing we do.”
My mobile phone started ringing.
“Hang on, Fran, it’s my mother. Hey, Ma.”
The voice on the other end of the line was not my mother.
“Sheldon, this is your Aunt Tilly.”
“Oh. Hi, Aunt Tilly. Is everything okay?”
“You will not believe what your mother just called me.”
“I don’t know. I’ve heard practically the entire English dictionary and then some come out of her mouth.”
“I can’t even repeat it.”
This was definitely not turning out to be the call I wanted to hear.
“If she refuses to apologize, I will apologize on her behalf.”
“No, you will not. She is stinking drunk right now, and I don’t know what to do with her.”
“You’re probably not going to go for this, but usually what I do is get her some more gin. She’ll drink it down and eventually pass out. When she finally wakes up the next day and shakes out the cobwebs, she’ll be bubbly and amiable just like it never happened.”
“This is insanity Sheldon. I’m not going to give a raving drunk more alcohol.”
“Yeah, I didn’t think you would.”
Fran’s countenance showed concerned amusement from hearing the one side of the conversation. He was unaware of my mother’s affliction until that moment. I was disappointed. In the back of my mind I kept saying to myself her sobriety of late was a little too fantastic. Now I was contemplating flying out to Dover.
“Aunt Tilly, there are usually little triggers that send her down that path. It’s not yours or anyone’s fault, but can you think of anything that happened yesterday or before that might have had some impact on her psyche. It’s really no excuse for her. I’m just curious.”
“The only thing I can think of is that at my last doctor’s appointment, they found that my mineral levels were too low. Your mother seemed to have a tough time with that for some reason.”
I could see how that would be a little reminder to my mother of Aunt Tilly’s impending passing. Aunt Tilly was Mamma’s self-appointed mission. My mother could take any little thing and turn it into a reason to start imbibing and sabotage whatever mission she set out to accomplish.
Another call was coming in from the Tanner agency.
“Aunt Tilly, all I can tell you is that she will fall asleep, and she will come out of it. She will be there for you tomorrow.”
“I don’t know if I want her to be.”
“Tomorrow would be the time to tell her. Let her sleep it off. I have to take this call. I’ll talk to you soon.”
I clicked over to the other call.
“Sheldon here.”
“Howdy, Sheldon.” It was Sunday.
“We had a little scheduling mishap and wondered if you could do a little talk on short notice.”
“Um, when and where?”
“It’s a transition home in Lompoc. It’s tomorrow evening actually.”
“A halfway house in the wine ghetto? I’m there. Who am I replacing?”
“It’s Vesodious. He’s up in the Bay Area doing a similar gig.”
“Now I feel bad for the chumps who have to listen to me knowing they’re missing out on Vesodious.”
“I’ll email you the details. Most of these guys just got out of prison.”
I always enjoyed taking the 101 North. Once I made it through the overheated suburbs of two valleys, I was greeted with a blast of unobstructed ocean air driving down the hill into Camarillo. Just beyond Ventura, the vast Pacific opened up on the left reflecting the afternoon sun as millions of twinkling lights. I drove right through Santa Barbara and stopped at the Bacara in Goleta to make lodging arrangements for the night. It was an extravagant move, but I thought it would provide the right atmosphere to get my Talking Heads preparation moving again.
The halfway house in Lompoc was a stark contrast to the opulence of the Bacara. If there were a welcome mat, I could imagine the tenants would be stapling on the letters “U” and “N” once they found out the speaker was me rather than Vesodious Prime. I couldn’t blame them. My upbringing and life experience were miles away from anything these fellows would have gone through. A connection early on would be crucial. If they weren’t with me from the beginning, they wouldn’t hear the rest of it. I hadn’t said a word and already the ill will manifested.
“Seriously, what the fuck can you tell us that we don’t already know?” asked one eager listener.
“Oh, I know you’ve got all the answers already. I don’t even want to waste your time reviewing the answers. That shit is kindergarten. I just want to talk about turning the answers into action. Pretty simple stuff, but it might be new to you. I apologize that Vesodious Prime could not make it today. I will not even attempt to mimic the flow of the grandmaster unless y’all want a good laugh and reason to lose all respect for me.”
“You’ve got to earn our respect. You don’t know what it’s like to be us. You never will.”
“True.”
Well, it looked like I would finally get my Stand and Deliver moment, only these guys weren’t in high school, and I wasn’t teaching them math.
“None of y’all had a dad like mine, right? My daddy was great. He used to take me with him to the bar. He knew I didn’t like shit food like meat and vegetables, so he’d buy me candy bars for lunch and sometimes dinner too. How many of you guys got candy bars for dinner when you were kids. Pretty fucking awesome, huh? And when I messed up, he sure showed me what to do to someone when they mess up. And the drunker he was, the better he was at showing me. How many of your dads had that kind of hands on approach? I still don’t quite know why my mamma left him. I haven’t seen him since my mamma took me away from him. I don’t even know if he’s still alive. But I guess I don’t really care because he made such an impression early on, it’s like he taught me a lifetime of lessons.”
I really wished I had made all this up. I wished what I had just said was some ploy I had come up with to get the audience on my side.
“Are you sure we ain’t half-brothers?” asked the same heckler.
The men in the room exploded into laughter. We were brothers now. I proceeded to drop knowledge.
“And here we had this whole discussion about you not sleeping with Cami.”
“No. It’s my laptop.”
“Oh. Bummer.”
“Well, you’re some kind of a tech guy. What do I do? I can’t open a single program. I have an ever growing stack of windows telling me my machine is fucked and that I need to pay a hefty ransom to unfuck it.”
“Sounds like you need to wipe the drive.”
“Not cool. All my notes and all my pr0n? No way.”
“You’re not backing all that stuff up?”
“Backing up to what? The CNC servers? That’s not an option for me anymore. I’ve got this Talking Heads thing coming up, and I need to do my homework. I’m thinking of just paying these scammer guys off to get my machine back.”
“Don’t embolden the enemy. You never negotiate with cyber-terrorists. And we need to have a discussion about external hard drives by the way. Bring it on over, and I’ll see what I can do. I set up a web cam to watch that nefarious traffic light, so I’ve had some more time on my hands lately.”
“I’m coming right over then.”
“We’ll back up your notes and… prawn before we hose the system. You have your recovery discs, right?”
“I hope I can find them.”
“I might be able to fix it even if you can’t find the discs. What’s prawn? You have some giant shrimp on your system?”
“Okay, now I’m really freaking out. Maybe I should call the nerd squad.”
“Save your money, Shel. Don’t let me miss this opportunity to be the guy with the answers.”
Whenever I had a computer related issue at CNC, I’d always check with Fran first, and he usually knew what to do. Every now and then Fran would be stumped though, so I would turn to this kid in the IT department, Yevgeny. Yevgeny never failed. He could hack himself out of the Amazon rain forest in five seconds. Yevgeny had this horribly condescending bedside manner. He was literally dumbfounded every time I did not know the solution to my technological problem. He would shake his head with a smile of disgust as he remedied whatever ailed my machine. “Sheldon, all you have to do is a simple registry edit. A child could do this.” Yevgeny was my last resort.
In my current situation, I wanted to call Yevgeny immediately. I decided instead to avoid certain humiliation and let Fran have a crack at it.
The slow traffic over to the Wilkinson house surprisingly helped to calm my mood a bit. I had time to ponder a Plan B. I’d actually already absorbed a quite a few of the elevator speeches and dossiers I had prepared for various prospective clients. I had generic talking points for those with whom I was unfamiliar. And then I realized at that point I was a salesman. I was selling the Nell Tanner brand, and the exclusive product was I. By missing the notes too much, I was becoming what I despised. This guy likes to golf. That guy likes to make fishing flies. So fucking what, I say. I’m not going to kiss your ass. You’re going to kiss mine and beg me to motivate your people into producing more profit for you. I’ll take your money, and then I’ll tell your people how they can take your money too.
“I’m a little worried about you working on this, Fran. This seems like one of those things that could cause your blood pressure to spike.”
I probably shouldn’t have said that with Mel in the room. If she had a gun in her hand at that moment, she might have used it on me. Fran laughed it off.
“There is nothing to worry about. Besides, my medication keeps everything in check.”
“Fran, the minute I hear a cuss word out you, that’s it. Sheldon and his computer will have to leave,” threatened Mel.
“The bad words actually help relieve pain and stress. I read that somewhere. I would be more worried if he weren’t cussing up a storm. In fact, Fran, you should try to cuss at least a hundred times a day. It could really work wonders.”
“You show me that article, Sheldon,” Mel ordered.
“As soon as Fran gets my laptop working again, I promise I will.”
Eating up that conundrum, Mel left the room saying, “I’m baking cookies for you, Sheldon, and you’re going to put him through this?”
“I’ll only eat the cookies if he makes it through to the other side of this ordeal.”
I set the laptop on the table, opened the lid, and pressed the power button. The machine whirred to life, and shortly after, a message on the screen prompted me to log on. I typed in my credentials and waited. Within a few seconds the first window popped up urging me to deal with the incredible number of infections, discovered festering in my operating system, by downloading the latest and greatest virus-killing software. Closing the window only caused another to pop up in its place. Trying to open any application was fruitless. The moment of truth came when Fran attempted to open the running task manager.
“If we can open this, we can hopefully at least stop the virus from keeping you from running your programs.”
Fran couldn’t open it. He wanted to say, “Fuck.” Instead he said, “Let me try booting up in safe mode.”
Then came another unspoken F-bomb moment after a minute or so of restarting the machine. “We can’t log in as an administrator.”
“Fran, I don’t know what that means.”
He just stared at the screen. I couldn’t tell if he was about to scream or cry.
“We should call Yevgeny, Shel.”
In my head, I went through a checklist of all the bits and bytes that would soon disappear. I handed Fran the startup discs.
“You know, Fran… half the fun of pr0n is tracking it down in the first place.”
“You sure you want to do this?” The pall of despair gently lifted from Fran.
“Do it.”
Fran suddenly found a surge of energy. “I’m not ready to give up just yet.”
He booted from the disc and attempted to repair the operating system. That didn’t work. He downloaded and ran a virus cleaner utility, which turned out to be a Trojan horse for another virus. Fran scoured the web, and eventually he discovered the trick to getting my data back. We drove down to the electronics store and bought a small hard drive enclosure to change the one in my machine from an internal drive to external drive—that’s how Fran explained it to me. He pulled the drive out of my laptop and inserted it into the enclosure. He plugged the now external drive into his computer and pulled off the files I needed. He put the drive back in my laptop. Then he erased it and reinstalled the operating system. And he did it all without making me wear a dunce cap and sit in the corner.
“Good show, old chap. Since you’re still standing, it looks like I’ll get to eat those cookies after all, although it puts me deeper in debt to you.”
“This may sound a little weird, Shel, but I want to thank you actually. I love retirement, but I also like helping my friends out. It makes me feel useful.”
“Well, in that case, maybe you can hear me out on where I think my prick is headed.”
Fran received the additional four-eleven on the lovely Carla Diaz. He didn’t hesitate with his advice.
“It really doesn’t matter if she’s a mom or not. If you dig her, then you dig her, and you make everything else fit.”
“I dug my ex-wife.”
“Yeah, people are going to change, and you can never tell quite where they’re going to go. I think seeing into the future would have a devastating effect on your soul. Think of all the wonderful experiences you would have let pass by just because you knew the relationship would end badly. You know for Mel and me, both sides of our family were against our relationship at first.”
“Well, I could understand her side’s perspective.”
“Sure. A crazy protestant hood like me. That was pretty frightening to an Irish Catholic family like Mel’s.”
“I love how organized religion brings us all together. And when I say, ‘Us,’ I’m referring to everyone who believes the same thing we do.”
My mobile phone started ringing.
“Hang on, Fran, it’s my mother. Hey, Ma.”
The voice on the other end of the line was not my mother.
“Sheldon, this is your Aunt Tilly.”
“Oh. Hi, Aunt Tilly. Is everything okay?”
“You will not believe what your mother just called me.”
“I don’t know. I’ve heard practically the entire English dictionary and then some come out of her mouth.”
“I can’t even repeat it.”
This was definitely not turning out to be the call I wanted to hear.
“If she refuses to apologize, I will apologize on her behalf.”
“No, you will not. She is stinking drunk right now, and I don’t know what to do with her.”
“You’re probably not going to go for this, but usually what I do is get her some more gin. She’ll drink it down and eventually pass out. When she finally wakes up the next day and shakes out the cobwebs, she’ll be bubbly and amiable just like it never happened.”
“This is insanity Sheldon. I’m not going to give a raving drunk more alcohol.”
“Yeah, I didn’t think you would.”
Fran’s countenance showed concerned amusement from hearing the one side of the conversation. He was unaware of my mother’s affliction until that moment. I was disappointed. In the back of my mind I kept saying to myself her sobriety of late was a little too fantastic. Now I was contemplating flying out to Dover.
“Aunt Tilly, there are usually little triggers that send her down that path. It’s not yours or anyone’s fault, but can you think of anything that happened yesterday or before that might have had some impact on her psyche. It’s really no excuse for her. I’m just curious.”
“The only thing I can think of is that at my last doctor’s appointment, they found that my mineral levels were too low. Your mother seemed to have a tough time with that for some reason.”
I could see how that would be a little reminder to my mother of Aunt Tilly’s impending passing. Aunt Tilly was Mamma’s self-appointed mission. My mother could take any little thing and turn it into a reason to start imbibing and sabotage whatever mission she set out to accomplish.
Another call was coming in from the Tanner agency.
“Aunt Tilly, all I can tell you is that she will fall asleep, and she will come out of it. She will be there for you tomorrow.”
“I don’t know if I want her to be.”
“Tomorrow would be the time to tell her. Let her sleep it off. I have to take this call. I’ll talk to you soon.”
I clicked over to the other call.
“Sheldon here.”
“Howdy, Sheldon.” It was Sunday.
“We had a little scheduling mishap and wondered if you could do a little talk on short notice.”
“Um, when and where?”
“It’s a transition home in Lompoc. It’s tomorrow evening actually.”
“A halfway house in the wine ghetto? I’m there. Who am I replacing?”
“It’s Vesodious. He’s up in the Bay Area doing a similar gig.”
“Now I feel bad for the chumps who have to listen to me knowing they’re missing out on Vesodious.”
“I’ll email you the details. Most of these guys just got out of prison.”
---
I always enjoyed taking the 101 North. Once I made it through the overheated suburbs of two valleys, I was greeted with a blast of unobstructed ocean air driving down the hill into Camarillo. Just beyond Ventura, the vast Pacific opened up on the left reflecting the afternoon sun as millions of twinkling lights. I drove right through Santa Barbara and stopped at the Bacara in Goleta to make lodging arrangements for the night. It was an extravagant move, but I thought it would provide the right atmosphere to get my Talking Heads preparation moving again.
The halfway house in Lompoc was a stark contrast to the opulence of the Bacara. If there were a welcome mat, I could imagine the tenants would be stapling on the letters “U” and “N” once they found out the speaker was me rather than Vesodious Prime. I couldn’t blame them. My upbringing and life experience were miles away from anything these fellows would have gone through. A connection early on would be crucial. If they weren’t with me from the beginning, they wouldn’t hear the rest of it. I hadn’t said a word and already the ill will manifested.
“Seriously, what the fuck can you tell us that we don’t already know?” asked one eager listener.
“Oh, I know you’ve got all the answers already. I don’t even want to waste your time reviewing the answers. That shit is kindergarten. I just want to talk about turning the answers into action. Pretty simple stuff, but it might be new to you. I apologize that Vesodious Prime could not make it today. I will not even attempt to mimic the flow of the grandmaster unless y’all want a good laugh and reason to lose all respect for me.”
“You’ve got to earn our respect. You don’t know what it’s like to be us. You never will.”
“True.”
Well, it looked like I would finally get my Stand and Deliver moment, only these guys weren’t in high school, and I wasn’t teaching them math.
“None of y’all had a dad like mine, right? My daddy was great. He used to take me with him to the bar. He knew I didn’t like shit food like meat and vegetables, so he’d buy me candy bars for lunch and sometimes dinner too. How many of you guys got candy bars for dinner when you were kids. Pretty fucking awesome, huh? And when I messed up, he sure showed me what to do to someone when they mess up. And the drunker he was, the better he was at showing me. How many of your dads had that kind of hands on approach? I still don’t quite know why my mamma left him. I haven’t seen him since my mamma took me away from him. I don’t even know if he’s still alive. But I guess I don’t really care because he made such an impression early on, it’s like he taught me a lifetime of lessons.”
I really wished I had made all this up. I wished what I had just said was some ploy I had come up with to get the audience on my side.
“Are you sure we ain’t half-brothers?” asked the same heckler.
The men in the room exploded into laughter. We were brothers now. I proceeded to drop knowledge.
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