Tech Guy is demoted

A month or so before Christmas, one of my desktop monitors quit working. Or at least I thought it had. Before I alerted Tech Guy (a moniker I stole from an author instructor), I turned the monitor off and then on again in a sort of reset. If unplugging and replugging hadn't required a lot of crawling on the floor under my desk, I might have done that.

Hubby strode into the office, asking his usual aberrational questions, and the monitor worked with one touch of his finger. After several tit-for-tat and the beginnings of what might have turned into a huge argument, he admitted that the monitor was fairly old and probably on its last legs.

Him: "The problem is the video card might also be bad."

I heard that statement in bold capital letters like this:

THE PROBLEM IS CATASTROPHIC!

His explanation only increased the problem until I'd come to the conclusion that to replace the monitor with a new one would result in me losing everything on my computer, including my two and a half-written novels. (Even though they are on jump drives)

Because anytime Tom works on a computer, it is at least a day, usually several days, of ripping the innards, and when everything is up and running again, I'm left with searching for files and programs that are forever gone.

Now, I've concluded he makes these off-the-cuff remarks to deter me.

For Christmas, he gave me a new monitor. It has sat in its box in my dining room, and every time he sits down to eat, he asks if I want him to replace it with my old one...this weekend.

Then, the weekend comes and goes without monitor replacement. Oleg and I play the game of how many off-and-on flicks it takes to ready my monitor for use every day.

The answer? Anywhere between 3 and 11.

Finally, on one of those days where it was 11, Oleg decided he would attempt to replace the monitor, and if it didn't work as Tom kept threatening, we would pack it back up into the box and wait for Tech Guy to do his magic. After dinner, and long before Tom came home from work, Oleg moved out file cabinets, junk, chairs, etc., to crawl under my desk and unhook the old monitor. He removed the new one and hooked it up on the floor first to make sure it would work.

It did. BAM. No problem.

Like...no problem. It took maybe half an hour from start to finish, which included vacuuming the crap accumulated under my desk, Clorox wiping my desk, and rearranging everything back under the desk. Oh, and I did that part, not Oleg.

We put the old monitor on Tom's desk, and while he was a tad chagrined when he came into my office to see the new monitor, I don't think he minds that he is now Tech Guy #2.