Payback

I spent the weekend working a co-worker's computer. I knew I was up for a challenge when I booted it up and it said "No." For whatever reason, it would not allow access to important parts of the hard drive. It even told checkdisk to go away.

After consulting with a friend who makes me look like an amature (that's because she's a network administrator and I'm an accountant and, therefore, an amateur), I decided to reinstall Windows. And of course, it didn't install a number of important drivers. I downloaded them from Dell's web site and installed them manually.

And then came the endless updates. Thank God for broadband.

As I was going down for a nap Sunday afternoon, my co-worker called. Her 11 year old son wanted to see if it was ready yet. He wanted it back, and now.

I told her it was more or less ready. There were some things like Flash and Java that I wasn't sure were up to date, but otherwise, ready to go.

She stopped by with her son. He's a real cutie. He'll be a heart-breaker one of these days. Blond hair, big old eyes that only kids and cats seem to have.

I started showing them a few things that might be different (like the anti-virus program) and he almost started jumping up and down. "Look, mom. It's better than it was before."

I carried it out to the car and put it in the back seat. He crawled in next to it and curled up around it, hugging it the way someone might hug a favorite pet.

His mother told me that he insisted on going home immediately. When they got there, he her to go away when she offered to help hook it up. So she went out and ran the rest of the errands she had planned. When she got back, he had everything hooked up and told her, "Mom, this is so much better than it used to be."

Silly, inconsequential story, perhaps. But seeing that little boy's face light up like it was Christmas morning was more than worth it all.

My co-worker kept on telling me she wanted to pay me, but I told her that I've had a lot of help from other people over the years. In fact, without their help, I wouldn't have been able to do what I did for her.

It's payback. The good kind.