The Geek

by roopa swaminathan

It was a long and difficult day at work. The Dean was in a snippy mood at our faculty meeting and as the only adjunct working today — I caught the brunt of his nitpicking. Lunch was a bust since I had a class immediately after listening to my boss whine about how much the college’s budget was being cut that semester. Given I make $2400 per class — his moaning about lack of money did not go over well with me.

Unsurprisingly, the kids started acting up in class. Trying to get them to stop looking at their social media on their phones when I was lecturing is a never-ending nightmare. The phones constantly interrupted me — beeping notification sounds on Instagram / Facebook to girls posing for a selfie smack-dab in the middle of my lecture to kids playing computer games — the indifference permeating my classroom was relentless. To top it all — when I objected to a kid jabbing his fingers playing a game on his phone, he responded with a straight face that he was using the machine to take notes. This is from a kid who wouldn’t know how to spell his own name.

Basically, if something/anything could go wrong, it did.

Finally, about ten minutes before the end of my lecture my beat-up laptop decided to test my patience and went kaput on me. I called the school’s IT guy for help even as the kids hung around waiting to see if I would continue with the lecture. Given they paid no attention when my laptop actually worked — I figured that the smart thing to do would be to just call it a day and sent the kids off just as the IT guy showed up.

He looked at my laptop with a serious expression, oohed and aahed, made faces, tapped on a few keys on the keyboard, lifted the laptop and looked underneath it — for god knows what — and shook his head.

“What is it?” I asked him worriedly.

Inside I was panicking. I’m one of those people who constantly mean to back up their work but never actually do. And every time something like this happens — like my laptop tries to crash and burn on me — I’d start praying to every god out there and promise that if things worked out this time I’ll definitely back up everything from now on.

Today was no different and I folded my hands and prayed hard.

After patting and prodding and sighing repeatedly the IT guy finally turned my laptop back on.

PHEW! What a relief! I tried to take the laptop from him when the dude gestured that he wasn’t done with me yet. He shushed me as I started to thank him and explained that while, luckily, my hard drive was intact — just some malware that he successfully eliminated — it didn’t mean it was all OK. Such malware should never have made its way into my computer, he lectured. After making sure that I actually did have an anti-virus program installed on my computer, he spoke again.

“I’m not sure how this malware got into your system then? Since you do have McAfee installed. This malware is extremely vicious and bypassed McAfee. Did you stream or download something from a site that was unsafe?” He peered at me suspiciously.

At first, I didn’t get what he was saying. I shook my head to say no. He continued to peer at me before the lightbulb clicked and I understood. And what I understood made me infuriated. What the hell? What was he trying to get at? What did he think I was watching or streaming or downloading? Like what? Porn?

I was self-righteously livid. And frankly… so what if I did watch porn? Who was he to judge?

He saw how upset I’d gotten and quickly placated me and said I should take care not to let my laptop get infected in the future.

“Or you’ll lose everything,” he warned. I nodded. He did have a point.

As he got up to leave, he looked at the whiteboard filled with my handwriting and asked me about my classes. I replied that I taught Introduction to Political Science and Comparative Politics and a few other creative writing classes and that I was looking for a tenure-track teaching job in the Social Sciences. In the meantime, I worked as an adjunct at the school and taught up to six classes each semester.

My friendly neighborhood IT bro looked me up and down.

“Oh, wow! Social Sciences,” he smirked. “That’s like Real Science’s step-brother!” And laughed at his own joke. Then he oozed even more shades of unimpressed and drawled superciliously, “I have a Ph.D. in Computer Science. For me, getting a degree in the Humanities is where I’d go for a vacation.”

I responded politely, “Writing computer language code my entire life is where my soul would go to die.”