Geek Squad Wannabe

I’m the tech support for my family: something goes wrong with Mom and Dad’s computer, they call me. Tonight, the call came from my sister—who was calling from my parent’s house. She had taken her boys to Michigan for the week; she had packed her laptop, too, and it couldn’t connect to Mom and Dad’s wireless network. Something about the password needing to be either 40 or 104 ASCII characters, something that was never a problem on my computer or the folk’s computer. I had run into the issue with Anne’s computer before, and I knew this was trouble. My geek credentials were about to be sorely tested.

In the past, Anne’s computer has been able to connect to Mom and Dad’s network, but that was before the Geek Squad, the real Geek Squad, came out to set up their new Vista-running laptop, and set the wireless network password for them. Admittedly, setting that password is something I could have done for them ages ago. I just never did, because I knew from past experience that Anne’s laptop, for whatever reason, wouldn’t be able to connect, and I didn’t figure there were a whole lot of computer hackers living in a sleepy Kalamazoo condo subdivision. I had avoided this issue in the past, but with my sister on the other end of the phone anxious to have her computer work the way it had always worked before, it was time to face the mystery of the uncooperative encryption.

I did a quick Google search and came up with a possible reason for the problem—the hardware in her laptop wasn’t set to use the same encryption as the router—or even capable of doing so. Since neither one of us really wanted to mess with the settings of Mom and Dad’s network (at least not without me there to fix any problems that my tinkering might create), that meant we had to find a solution within Anne’s laptop. And then it hit me—Mom and Dad’s old computer used a removable wireless network card! We could insert that into Anne’s laptop, and viola! problem solved!

It wasn’t, of course, that easy.

The first glitch in the process was human error. After a little rummaging through computer disks and peripherals that he hasn’t touched in years—accompanied by, Anne relayed to me over the phone, a little under-the-breath swearing—Dad found the CD with the device drivers, and Anne slipped it into her laptop—but the New Hardware Wizard couldn’t find the drivers. This struck me as odd. The wizard always finds the drivers when (then it hit me) when the right CD is installed.

“Hey Anne, eject the disk and tell me what it says.”

“Um . . . ‘Netgear Wireless Router—’”

I cut her off. “Nope. Wrong disk. We need the disk that came with the adapter.”

“Dad, we need the disk that came with the adapter.” Pause. “He’s swearing some more.”

The swearing must have helped, because Dad quickly found the right disk, which made installing the drivers much easier.

As it turned out, that was to be the only easy part of the whole process, and also the only successful part.

With the new drivers installed, we then disabled the built-in adapter and restarted the computer. So far, so good. But then we couldn’t figure out how to get the damn thing to connect to the internet. Anne was still getting the same error message, something about the password needing to be 40 or 104 ASCII characters long. By this time, we’d been on the phone for almost an hour. Anne kept saying “I know you have better things to do with your time,” but the OCD in me didn’t want to give up. I know we were on the right track. We had disabled the built-in wireless network card. We had restarted he computer. But all to no avail, and I was fast running out of geeky ideas.

After about an hour of fiddling with various control panels and still no internet connection, Anne decided to call it quits. My OCD tendencies would have kept me at the problem for at least another hour, but it was an hour later in Michigan, Anne had had a long drive earlier in the evening, and she finally just resigned herself to not getting her computer to work.

I felt like turning in my pocket protector. Christopher’s Friendly Family Telephone Tech Support had been thwarted by 40 (or maybe 104) ASCII characters.

It’s not that Anne can’t check her email without her computer. She can always use Mom and Dad’s. But as a stay-at-home Mom, she’s gotten used to having the internet just a few steps away while she watches her sons, ages 6 and 3. When they all visit Mom and Dad, the boys play in the finished basement, where the only internet access is wireless. Anne herself said the lack of connectivity wasn’t a big deal, it was just a convenience she had gotten used to, and she could get used to going “old fashioned” for a week. Technology is not the be-all and end-all of our existence.

My sister is right. A break from technology is a good thing. When I’m camping this weekend, there won’t be a computer (or indoor plumbing, for that matter) anywhere nearby. Just me, my gear, and miles of pristine Lake Michigan shoreline. And I don’t need 40 or 104 ASCII characters to enjoy that.