Tech Support
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| 5/1/2008 |
by Ames S.
amess@sober24.com
After the eighth call to tech support, I realized I was in the grip of
a powerful obsession. My wife had tried to clue me in a number of hours
earlier, but I wasn’t able to hear it.
After the eighth call to tech support, I realized I was in the grip of a powerful obsession. My wife had tried to clue me in a number of hours earlier, but I wasn’t able to hear it.
“Leave me alone. I’m trying to figure this thing out.”
Even the cat knew something was wrong. With wires poking out everywhere normally he would have been sneaking around trying to play, but instead he just sat on the windowsill across the room and watched.
If that wire connects to this, then this wire should connect to that. It had all started innocently enough, a simple installation. Everything seemed to be going smoothly, and while I hit a couple of snags, I felt I was making progress.
The first call to tech support was really just a formality. I pretty much had it all figured out, I just needed a little assistance putting together the finishing touches. I was installing an all-in-one printer/scanner/copier/fax, and three out of the four functions were up and running. I was pretty impressed with myself. But I have learned over the years to utilize help that is offered, whatever the circumstance might be, so when the fax didn’t fall into line I decided to reach out to customer service, fully expecting the call to be the coup de grace that would have the final function finessed in no time.
And I came very close. With the guidance of a pleasant service technician who suggested a little tweaking here and there, I was able to send and then receive a test fax. The finish line was in sight.
I still had to hook up the telephone answering machine, but when the service technician asked if there was anything else he could do for me I heard myself uttering those fateful words, “No, that’s okay. I’ll do it myself.”
I’ve had plenty of experience with obsession – all of it bad – with many overwrought hours beginning in just the same way. So innocent, so close to completion.
Predictably, the telephone answering machine didn’t work. So I tried hooking it up a little differently, pulling one wire from here and connecting it there. No luck. Another configuration produced no beneficial results, and before long, I was pulling out wires and plugging them back in God knows where.
When I was drinking, I used to do the same thing with my apartment. It was before the idea of feng shui was popular, but I had this idea that if I could just find the right configuration of the furniture great things were going to happen. With the couch in proper relation to the chair and the bureau in proper relation to the desk, anything was possible. I could even have a party, maybe meet a girl. The sky was the limit.
Needless to say, I lived in a studio apartment and had just a few pieces of furniture that I had picked up off the street, so there weren’t too many configurations to be had from the start, but that never stopped me.
Like my first brush with tech support, things often started out well; a few drinks, a moment of inspiration, a few more drinks. I’d move the couch away from the wall just to get the creative juices flowing. Then the bureau. It was all coming together in my mind.
With a few more drinks, the creative vision got a little fuzzy and the game plan began to blur. Was I going to put the rocking chair by the window or in the corner by the stereo? And where the hell can I put the speakers?
By the end of the evening, I would have pushed all the furniture into the middle of the room, the creative vision totally gone. I couldn’t remember what the apartment was going to look like, nor could I remember what it had looked like before I began all the rearranging. So everything sat that way for a few days while I drank.
Eventually, piece by piece, the furniture would get pulled out of the center of the room into some kind of order, sliding back into place against the wall like an ice cube melting in the middle of a pan.
The final call for tech support came some nine hours after the operation had begun and ended with the feeble admission from the eighth different service technician that perhaps there was something wrong with the hardware. He suggested I put it back in the box and try a new one. I felt like I had just been put out of my misery.
It turned out that a friend of mine had called during the time that I was trying to set up my printer/scanner/copier/fax, somebody sober quite a long time. Somebody, in fact, who had just had a similar experience with such a printer/scanner/copier/fax and had found a workable solution after many hours of struggle such as those that I – and my family – had just endured. My wife had taken the call and described to him what was going on. My friend told her about his own recent struggles and outlined the very simple solution he had come up with. He offered to pass it on to me, but my wife suggested that I “might not be in the mood” to hear what he had to say. And she was right. Caught up in obsessive thinking is a very ugly place for me. I get harsh and bitter. Frustrated and scared. Angry and resentful. There is no solution. The only thing to do is to keep plowing ahead. It’s like a person sitting in a car with a dead battery, turning the key over and over, listening to the churning of the starter, hoping against hope that this time the damned engine will fire, this time the right configuration of furniture will come together, this time the fax will work.
So, in the end, I was relieved that tech support finally pulled the plug. I think I might still be trying.
Thankfully, it doesn’t happen often. And when it does, I’ve learned to let the obsession die once it has wound down to the point that I can step back. Like the car with the dead battery, I have to get out and walk away.
What I love about sobriety – and what I didn’t have when I was drinking – is the community of friends with whom I can share and from whom I can draw experience. They can’t always help me avoid the obsessive behavior – or the dead battery -- but if and when I can break free, they can help me find solutions that keep me from starting the obsession right back up again.
So, the next day I got back in touch with my friend, as well as another I knew to be pretty tech-savvy. They both had the same solution that I implemented quite easily the next day. And today, I sent myself a fax from the office just to see if it would work.
It did.
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