Work.

Worked at the scrapyard today, and overheard my boss describe me to a trucker as "the brainiac over there," because I "can do computer things." Someone has been deceiving this poor woman, and I think it's me. The more I do work things in the not-college world, the more of a dunce I turn out to be. All I can say is, thank science for Google. Really. My beloved boss, henceforth called DP, is a self-taught computer genius, with no formal education to speak of, 4 grown children, 3 ex husbands, and a backwoods upbringing. This is a woman who can speak at length on how to butcher, bleed, and cook venison, drives a firebird, owns two motorcycles, and collects cars that her mechanic husband drag races all over the country. She weighs about 110 pounds, outlines her eyes in thick, kohl-like eyeliner, and scoliosis has curved her back to make her about 5'4, but she commands, baby. She. Knows. Scrap. And she knows computers.

She has networked EVERYTHING together, created entire databases of information that automatically update if any user makes a change, she's taken Quickbooks and made it her bitch, she's fixed computer hardware with a broken screwdriver she found in a scrap bin, and what's more, ladies and gentlemen, she has attained the unattainable: DP has broken the Microsoft Office Suite, as one breaks a wild stallion, taming it and bending it to her every will with the minutest of keystrokes from her black-tipped gothic french manicured nails.

Do you know what this means? OF course you do. You have gotten into screaming matches with Word, when it won't format your shit. You have searched and searched and SEARCHED for the superscript font, but you can't find it. You have tabbed, caps locked, returned, and track-commented yourself into a foaming passion that can only be cured by knocking over your office chair, watching 2 hours of the food network, and eating peanut butter right out of the jar.

Can you even imagine a person to whom Word and Excel cower in fear? Can you imagine a person who, at one point in time, must have leaned in to a computer monitor, her breath making delicate fog clouds on the screen, and quietly whispered, "not this time, motherfucker," and then systematically ripped open the inner macros and micros and formats and options until nothing sacred and nothing secret remained? And every time after that, when a new blank document was to be created, Office let out a sigh of submission and bent over?

I have met this person, and she is formidable, with all her venison and Harleys. And somehow, this person thinks that I am her equal, that she can relinquish her extraneous tasks to me, and I will be able to do them with her same kind of mastery and skill. DP will rattle off a series of instructions to me to do this, do that, network this, create that, print this, sum-total this, cascade menu these things, link this spreadsheet with this database, import these entries into Quickbooks in this format, and all I can do is sit there and nod my head, give her the good ole "oh, yeah, I've been doing this for YEARS, lady," and turn to my computer hoping to god whatever comes up on her monitor will be interesting enough to divert her eyes from mine for at least an hour or two while I frantically:

1. try to remember what is the end result I'm trying to accomplish from this heinous list of computer tasks she has given me,

2. google the ever-loving crap out of it to figure out how it's done,

3. trial-and-error the process for about 45 minutes until I feel safe taking the first leap into my pile of assignments.

And on top of this, I know it's crucial to every now and then ask a good question, to let her know I am totally on the level. So, every half hour I'll lean over and say, "DP, do you want this cascade menu to have some kind of default option, or do you want it to be a blank unless an option is chosen?" or, "DP, I'm re-formatting this bill of lading and I was wondering if you need these couple of fields to be fillable areas with set constraints, or if you want me to leave the document unprotected in case any of the legal language changes for each shipment." Do I know what I'm saying? Not really. But I seem to be doing ok in her eyes at least, because she's calling me the brainiac to a bunch of truckers. And she's liked my documents so far.

I have made one valuable contribution to the office computer network, and that was to essentially network the other 5 offices together with the Glen Burnie office through the free online vaulting site Dropbox. She had one document she needed all the offices to fill out each Monday without them emailing her their pieces and she sticking them manually into the spreadsheet for them. Through some miraculous, silvery and spider-thin connective arc from my past to my present, when I was a technical writer for Digi-Data, this kind of file-sharing gobbledygook was exactly what I was working on in its nascent stages back in 2008. So when she told me of this problem she was having, I got to work, googling (of course) the various programs available today to make this possible. In 20 minutes I had Dropbox, and in 4 hours I had 5 offices in MD and 1 in PA editing a single document, updating simultaneously, just like DP had going with all the programs in our main office.

And THAT little piece of brainiac karma I plan on riding until my legs are half driven into the ground.