To Tech Support

You have a thankless job.

 

“I’m having trouble downloading my files.”

“Are you getting an error message?”

“Yes.”

“What does it say?”

“I don’t know. Something like ‘missing something and then a bunch of letters’.”

It’s 3 PM and you’ve been at this for 7 hours. So far, you have spoken to one person who knows what a kilobyte is and another who understands the difference between ethernet and Internet and wireless. But for the most part, you spend your day translating, not supporting. They should call you Tech Translators, not Tech Support.

Remember when you first discovered coding? Eight years old and it was a simple program you found in a library book, something in Java. It didn’t do much, a simple animation, then you put it on a loop. You’d add a bit here and there, change a color, add text that could fade in and out.

But it was building something, building something with strokes on a keyboard. You began to develop allegiances to particular programs and systems, to hardware. Open source. It becomes political and philosophical. This is a matter of ethics and whole countries are being created. You are right on the edge of it, right at the beginning.

*****

“What’s a file extension?” he asks.

You are trying to walk him through reformatting a file. You stand up and peer over the top of your cubicle wall to the woman who works with you. You make the pretend-to-hang-yourself face. She used to laugh at that, but now she just rolls her eyes. She sits with a can of flavored popcorn next to her and never goes to lunch. You remind her that’s a snack from the 80’s and she admits she thinks somethings are better analog. She likes VHS. She’s younger than you are.

Whatever the new world is, it cannot come fast enough, you think. The transition is harder than you thought. You try to usher them over, one at a t time, hobbling and speechless. They squint at the screens and you must assure them. Over and over and over.