I didn’t go into IT because I love computers.

I went into IT because I hate computers and love people.

I came to it late. When you’re the girl at the top of your class, no one tells you you’re allowed to follow a career path that lets you use your hands, play with wires and screwdrivers, repair machinery, or – and this was big – generally do “guy things” for a living.

I should have known when I was sixteen. My first computer was a Tandy 1000 with a hard drive, the last model Radio Shack made before discontinuing the line. Beside it was a dot matrix printer that I used to work on the school newspaper, my hands a blur of mastery on the keyboard as I typed up articles in WordPerfect 5.1. The day that the printer became decidedly jammed and beyond repair, I was incensed, and I took my Daddy’s screwdriver to it until it was a pile of so many springs and wheels and bits. I found the jam.

I missed the hint when I put the printer back together and it worked perfectly. But it seemed normal to me, unleashing wrath on an inanimate piece of computer equipment and bending it to my will. It didn’t seem like a vocational calling. It was as natural as breathing.

My twenties and thirties were mostly about being a secretary. Sometimes for a lawyer, sometimes for a school system department, sometimes in a courthouse; always, I was the resident “computer person” that people asked for help. One attorney said, “You’re really intuitive with these, you know.” The clue whizzed overhead as I dove into paralegal studies.

The epiphany came in 2006, when I began working in the school social work office doing data analysis. A small pile of old IBM Thinkpads sat on top of a filing cabinet in our office. I asked about them and learned that the tech department (run by a woman with BPD who screamed a lot) wouldn’t touch them because they were too old (even though they were the model we were currently using), and that one had a bad floppy drive and one had a bad hard drive. I asked if I could Frankenstein them, with nothing to lose, and opened one up with a precision screwdriver. That was a big day for me. That was the day I broke my first laptop piece and ordered my first replacement part on eBay. A new world was born.

I got all three laptops up and running.

The screaming lady caught wind of it and became my mortal enemy. I wasn’t allowed to switch into a tech role in the school system until she retired. Within a month of her departure, I was on the help desk as a lead.

In the meantime, I’m pretty sure I repaired a laptop or desktop computer for each of the fifty-odd social workers in that department. I took the computers home and did the work on the side for $10/hour (student fees – and I still believe I’m learning and now will not allow anyone to pay for services, unless it’s in zucchini or lessons about this and that). My screwdriver collection grew, took on tiny tools and little gadgets. I built two desktop computers and a server for home. I repaired HP laptops by baking their motherboards in the oven on a cookie sheet at 385 degrees for 8 minutes with some quarters stacked on top of the graphics chips. I bought broken ones on Craigslist and attempted to repair them. Most of them I made worse. Most got recycled. But eventually, I taught myself enough to sit for the A+ certification exam and pass, the first time.

What is it like? I hate computers. I take joy in manipulating them, correcting them, reprogramming them, and when all else fails, thumping them or having at them with a screwdriver and a mission statement. The job satisfaction is in the human beings on the other end. Each co-worker I handed back a repaired computer was incredibly grateful, relieved that they hadn’t lost their son’s graduation pictures or their tax returns, able to work on their degree in the evening, able to do their banking without a virus, able to do anything at all. I understood what the moving parts did, but they understood restoration.

The pandemic clarified this for me. I was responsible for almost 200 classrooms’ audio/video equipment and computers and for a revolving door of broken Chromebooks (we sent 45,000 of them out to homes). Repairing was immensely enjoyable. I ripped the laptops apart and used the good bits left over to cobble together working ones so students would have computers to use to attend school remotely. I taught others how to do it. I oversaw their work. That should have been an ego boost that anyone would call job satisfaction.

Job satisfaction came early one Saturday morning in the fall of 2020, when I sat outside on a grassy patch of parking lot at an apartment complex, next to the office building (for wi-fi signal), across from a young mother and her three kids, helping her first-grader get signed on to a Chromebook. I had talked by phone with her several times that week and we just could not get things to work. She had passed through anger and frustration and into a passive, weary despair, and I had heard that in her voice and set up the appointment. So we masked and sat in the fresh air on the dewy grass, laptop out, and before she had to feed the baby and leave for work, I had fixed the problem and made her daughter smile.

It came when I talked a Spanish-speaking grandmother through resetting her grandson’s password over the phone, my broken Spanish even worse than her broken English. I spoke slowly and met her where she was, when making a capital letter began with “okay, toca a ese-hache-i-efe-te, pabajo y izquierda de las letras, mira?” and an hour later, I was spent and she was relieved. We got there.

It came when I sat across the desk from our CIO and had a heated argument about our implementation of an online-only job application system, after a cafeteria cook for an elementary school held back tears in my cubicle after I helped her change her password and tried in vain to steer her through navigating the awful new software. She just wanted to change schools. She was being bullied at her current job. No one would listen to her because she didn’t know enough English to explain, was not literate enough to write it out, could not use a computer to type it or to escape from it. We were cutting the bottom tier of our tech-capable employees out of the picture in the name of streamlining and modernizing.

The cafeteria lady hugged me when I quietly got a paper application from someone in HR and handed it to her.

I am in IT because I abhor leaving human beings behind. I am in IT because it places me in a position of power to advocate, to have a say in where “can” meets “should’ in technology. And if it means kicking a copier or quietly threatening a printer and instilling fear in its circuitry, so be it.

Now I work in a hospital. It’s exactly like a school. I receive messages and phone calls and frequently jump up to scurry down the hall, up a staircase, to do what needs to be done, however small or repetitive. I use humor to put frustrated people at ease, and I savor the relationships that form over time with those I serve. Sometimes, there’s a screwdriver or a mouse in my pocket. Sometimes, I get to help a patient directly. Sometimes, I get a high-five in the cafeteria.

It feels like a superpower, being in IT. And my career has almost nothing to do with computers.