See I Told You So / A Geek for a Day

You can laugh at me, or awe at my supreme skill of anticipation (not!?).  But look, I’ve already told you so.  Skip the 1,400-word wall of text of my previous post and scroll to the third last paragraph.  Come back when you are done, OK?  Yep, I predicted how the American Idol would end.

OK.  I know geeks are not sexy.  People think that geeks come from a world so far from this that we geeks shall all be banished into the land of Geek’dom.  Look, I don’t get glued in front of a computer screen the whole day living in a garage eating sandwiches while typing, having ketchup and mustard drip onto the keyboard, my lap, and smelling bad from inside to out.  Although I still have a whole week worth of dirty mugs sitting inside my sink as we speak, that is for an entirely different reason.

So, what exactly do geeks do, you must be wondering.  Well, wonder no more because I am going to share with you the down right unglamorous details.  There will be no holding back minus off the geek language.  Tailored especially for you!

At least I will try.

Thursday 8.50am, I dropped Cynthia at the airport.  So once again, I have been granted the bachelor status.  And I have promised her to assemble a new personal computer for myself over the weekend so that she can take over my existing machine at home.  Not bad for an excuse to buy new toys, eh?

Spent the rest of the morning watching the American Idol finale’s result show, I skipped lunch – true to the spirit of a geek’ology – and did a last minute research of what components to get.  Let me tell you, shopping for a personal computer is like shopping for a wardrobe of clothes, a full rack of shoes, a complete makeup set and skin care products, in one day, that is supposed to last you for two years and more.  It’s no easy task.

There is one particular shop I love in Sim Lim that is unique from all others.  You know how it feels when you walk into a shop looking for some real good advice and the salespersons don’t even have 5% of what you have already known?  This dude sold me a beast!  After hours of waiting for the folks to assemble my new machine (I paid 15 bucks for parking so you can imagine), when I finally got to see my new baby, gosh!  She is my F-cup bitch!  The machine looks sizably larger but in an esthetic way.  She weighs a ton too!  Nearly broke my back to carry her home.

6.30pm I arrived home with my new toy.  The first thing I did was to clear the area and prepare a temporary headquarter for some serious business.  If Cynthia was to cut short her holiday, she would have been shocked at the state of the living room right now.  The dining table was pulled to the center of the room, wires running everywhere, screws everywhere, loose and unimportant items lying on the floor, and I even set up a lamp by the dinning table, much like having an operation table in the middle of the room.  I have also prepared a towel and a bucket of water to clean up all the dust and the dirt, the breadcrumbs and the pieces of salmon that got stuck inside the keyboard.

7pm, I have finally got to switch on my new bitch!  So quiet, the machine runs; such music to my ears.  Installing Vista into my new machine was a lot less horrifying that I thought.  Machines hate me but that is another story.  Time flies when you are living as a geek.  Before I knew it, time was 8.30pm and I needed to buy a new moveable computer table before the shops close at 10pm!  The one that has wheels at the bottom so that I can roll the machine from living room to bedroom, from kitchen to bathroom – truly live the dream of a blogger who blogs anytime, anywhere.  Even when I am taking a …

Drove like a mad man, I reached the Ikea megastore at Tampines at 9pm.  I ran like a mad man from Ikea to Courts and back to Ikea and I can almost picture myself inside the “Amazing Race” show.  Who design these megastores?!  All I needed was to visit the furniture section that is right before the cashier.  But no, I have to follow a predesigned trail zigzagging through various sections before I can check out what choices I have.  It is the same at Courts.  The tables are on the ground floor.  But I have to take an escalator from the ground floor up to the third floor, run from one end of the room to another, take an escalator down to the second floor, repeat, and then another escalator down until I hit ground floor – where I was minutes ago, outside the barriers.

9.45pm I found my new computer table, with the exact color that I wanted, that weighted 19kg enough to break my poor back one more time.  Time to eat but all the restaurants close at 9.30pm.  Huh?!  All megastores should be like Mustafa, 24 by 7.  I had fast food near my area and after a long and deserving shower, it’s round 2!

11pm, I continued to set up my new found love, which was not the hard part.  I was trying to revive my old love because I ripped one component from my current machine and put it into my new one. 

(Wait!  That scene is so much like the Adam’s Rib episode from the Book of Genesis!)

2am in the morning I couldn’t revive my old computer with some antique components that I still keep.  3am, still not working fully as I wanted her to be.  5am, I felt so sleepy.  Bits and pieces of my old flame started to fall apart due to my obsessive compulsive nature.  I kept taking parts out and putting them back into the machine in different orders.  What I did, did not make sense no more.  I became a robot.

In the wee hours, just before the first ray of sun beamed into my sanctuary of freaky geeky experiments, I have decided that so long as my old computer still works – perhaps not what she was used to be – I would rather put a stop at this insanity and move on.  My old machine was about to die on me, I swear.  And Cynthia won’t be happy about this.

The moral of the story, if any, is that we often spend so much time fixing the past with our old flames and more often than not, it is better and wiser to invest time with our new found love instead.  Time to get my hands onto my new F-cup bitch tonight!  Round 3!

To fellow geeks: You must have thought that I have sold out and become commercial.  Fear not!  The next post will be so full of geek’ology and details and I promise to get you jump off your chairs and go wow. 

Stay tuned!