Does anyone who’s not in this line of work think much about IT until something goes wrong? I know I don’t, and then I’m always vastly annoyed at the inconvenience.

I am one of those people who watched technology come in like a tsunami. When I was a kid, my grandfather was playing around with DOS and spoke disdainfully of user interfaces that didn’t require starting with C prompts. My husband (who, much as I adore him, is one of the biggest rageballs I have ever seen when it comes to technology not doing what he wants and expects) actually spent a college semester working in the computer lab, where apparently the depth and breadth of his expertise extended to “unplug it and plug it back in.” I, myself, spent two semesters in a lazy pursuit of a computer science degree, only to dump the idea when I moved to Florida for a new job. (But I did learn HTML and Visual Basic, which were pretty handy for a few years after that.)

When I got hired to work on a news website fairly late in life (read: after I became a mom, which is good because that meant I had learned patience), I was constantly irked at the process—not because things broke, but because the IT folks circled their wagons so tightly and refused to let go of anything. They reminded me of those stories about priests in the Middle Ages who wanted to maintain their relevance so they refused to teach anyone else how to read. I understood that they didn’t want plebes going in and messing up stuff that would take hours to fix, but when the same thing breaks six times a day, and you have to wait a half hour for them to fix it every single time, it becomes a sore point. I got my way though: It only took me calling individuals at 1 a.m., 3 a.m., and 5 a.m. for three nights in a row before they grudgingly admitted me to their inner sanctum and showed me the 3 lines of code to fix, which I could have trusted my toddler to do—and did trust several other non-IT employees to do, with nary a slipup. (I wish I could tell this story with less schadenfreude, but … wait, no I don’t.) Ironically, we all ended up on pretty good terms by the end of my tenure.

These days, computers are sturdier things, and I work from home. My IT issues are (knock on wood) fairly straightforward, or so catastrophic that major overhauls are required. I have learned (for the most part) to back up my work in multiple places. My bigger issues now are with internet connectivity—rain seems to cause problems, as did squirrels chewing the lines last year.

Unfortunately, any mad skillz I might ever have pretended to have are long gone and I have become one of those people who can’t do whatever the computer equivalent is of changing my own oil. Best Buy’s Geek Squad has bailed me out of a couple jams over the years, as have the good people at Apple. So yes, let’s all give a hearty cheer for the folks in IT!