maintaining the continuum

One of the things I appreciate most about my husband is his sense of humor. He’s quick-witted and has the enviable ability to spin a good yarn on a moments notice. It’s mostly innate talent, but he honed his skills over many years as a semi-professional pun-meister.

He doesn’t labor over the puns - they come to him quickly and without struggle. It’s just the way his warped brain works. When we first started dating, he *punned* me constantly. It got to the point that I could see a pun coming from the first twinkle in his eye. I enjoyed, then put up with, then finally threatened physical harm if I heard one more of them. Now we live happily in a relatively pun-free household and he saves that part of his wit for friends and coworkers who don’t know him well enough to recognize when they’re about to be had.

Which brings me in a round about way to the purpose of this posting. Yesterday at work, I received an email from my beloved that gave me a good laugh when I really needed one so, with his permission, I’m passing it on to you. His caveat - "I know nothing about computers which makes the fact that I was asked to get involved with a computer problem all the more ludicrous." And now, on to the email:

We had some problems with our computers today. Files on the server mysteriously disappeared, but in no random pattern. Documents out of certain files were gone. Very mysterious. They searched for malicious code and found nothing. My boss was stressing (fiscal year end this month and 0 room for error). He asked me to get PERSONALLY involved (neither of us trust our IT guy).

I talked to the Help Desk and they were puzzled for about an hour and then found a very simple problem (it was not the server, but the viewing rights. Stuff was there, just not visible; 5 minute fix). So I told the boss all was fixed and OK. He was thrilled. He'd been thinking we were going to have to install the backups. He asked me what they did and I told him the "flux capacitors were failing and they replaced them with an ion drive; now the continuum is rebalanced." He looked at me and asked (quite seriously) "do you really understand that computer stuff?" I instantly knew by his question that he did not.