I just had a little revelation about my role in the world. I am the handyman of the 21st century—the Mr. Fixit of information technology. While I don’t boast that I have solutions to everything, I’ve come to accept that being a “computer geek” is a high demand position—not just in the corporate world, but in the home as well. And I really do like helping out. Here are a few recent experiences that brought me to see the light.

While preparing for a trip to New York, my sister-in-law, Leah, emailed a letter to all of our family members to organize the agenda etc. One of the plans was to go to see a Broadway show while in NY. Leah asked if I would try to find discount tickets to a show since I seem to know all of the “good places” to look. Since we had just found discounted tickets to Wicked the week earlier, it seemed natural that I might find a similar offer in NY. Unfortunately, I wasn’t successful this time, but I felt honored to be the “guy who knows how to get cheap tickets.” Being able to navigate the web, it turns out, is a very useful skill even outside of the programming world.

As I was driving to the airport this morning to drop Kelty off (she is going to NY for 3 weeks to be with her Mom), she mentioned how grateful she was that my line of work was so useful. Just yesterday, she had accidentally formatted our camera’s SD memory card, erasing gigabytes of irreplaceable pictures and video footage that we had taken recently. She was upset with herself for having done it, and having checked the Canon SD1100’s manual for hope, we had concluded that the photos were really gone. Well, almost. It turns out that even a “format” of the card will not erase the pictures (unless it’s a low-level format, which was not our case). Using a $21 card reader and this free but obscure software, we were able to recover all of our precious memories. Once again, tech skills came in handy.

Then, just as I was sitting down to write this article, I got another call. This time, Leah’s computer would not shut down. Windows had gone through the shutdown procedure but had frozen at the last moment, leaving the system on (you know how it goes). Anyway, I explained that you can just hold the power button down for several seconds and it will force the computer to turn off. And so the opportunities to serve in the home flourish.

What I feel must be something like the handyman’s feeling when he can fix a leaking faucet, replace the spring in the garbage can lid, or maybe rewire a light switch. It’s not that difficult, but the domain knowledge is just specialized enough that it seems somewhat magical to someone outside the domain.

Do we have a new title for this new century handyman? I don’t know. Maybe you can just call me Mr. Fix IT.