I've always been a curious person. Even as a child, I always wanted to know how things work. I wouldn't call it a passion or anything, just a sort of fact of my existence, I suppose. I've always felt it was this curiosity that lead me to work with computers as often and as closely as I have in my life.

I figure curiosity leads to observation, observation leads to deduction and so on, until you end up being the sort of person who looks at a problem not as an obstacle, but a fun new problem to solve -- and to me, it's clearly that sense of fun and drive to solve puzzles that makes me so good at fixing computers when they break. My friends, on the other hand, have a different theory.

It started with the usual jokes about how I must have some sort of electrical field about me that makes electronics work, but over the years the jokes sort of took on a life of their own. They went from amusing scenarios to legends and from legends, to myths.

Like the time I saved a modem that had literally melted when a glass of lemonade was spilled in it. (Really it was no big deal; I burned myself soldering a new Mosfet gate into place, but it was a 10 minute fix!) Or the time I had to get 13 stitches in foot because I'd planed a good quarter inch off the flesh while resurrecting a machine after a thunderstorm. (OK, sure, I did end up in the ER, but the computer was fine - the power switch had burned out. That's a fifty-cent part.) All these little stories, they added up until, all of a sudden, I had "The Touch".

As in:
"Don't worry man, my friend has the Touch; he can fix it."

"He can fix a computer just by walking by; he has the Touch."

It was sort of fun, at first. I mean, I even sort of had a sense of pride about it... but after awhile. Man, after awhile I started to realize an important lesson. The Touch comes at a cost.

It took me a decade to see it, but every great story about how I could fix any computer anywhere always had the part where I was getting electrocuted (while hot-swapping a drive on a TiVo), burned (fixing that modem), cut (finding that burned out switch) or otherwise maimed!

I didn't have the Touch, I had some sort of compact with powers dark, eldritch and oh, so dangerous! This was blood magic! I was literally giving of myself to bring these things back to life. You want to know how I got your printer working? BLOOD! MY BLOOD! This wasn't great at all! It was terrible!

Ever since that life-altering epiphany I have tried to hide from it. I've bottled up The Touch and I've suffered with the rest of the world. Hell I didn't even build my own system last time. You never can be too careful!

But... then it rained last night. Big thunder. The kind of thunder that should have you running to unplug your PC and any other gadget you care about. Sadly, I didn't go running. The power only went out for a split second. I mean, it was more a flicker than a power outage... but that surge was enough to make the computer go dead.

Times are tough. Who's got the money to get a computer fixed? Well, whatever your answer may have been, I'm gonna assume the answer wasn't "me" because, between you and me, I don't have the money to get a computer fixed.

But... You know... I do have lots of old computer parts. Yeah, they're from "before", back when I used the Touch, but the parts themselves aren't dangerous. How could they be? Besides, it's probably just the switch again; it's a common failure point in a power surge.

I didn't need the Touch to fix this computer! I just needed to change the switch.


(20 minutes later) Or... maybe the power supply.


But hey, I had one of those laying around and guess what?


I'm back online!

See, I didn't need the touch! Just my curiosity and these two han--


hey, when did I cut myself?!