The Pecking Order
The Source
My grandfather would talk about men in our community who knew horses backward and forward. They were the go-to fellas who knew exactly what a horse was worth, what was ailing him, and how to get the best out of four-legged equine pulling a plow. In his little community, the guy who knew horses was the top of the pecking order. My dad had a similar esteem for mechanics. Having spent most of his working life as a John Deere dealer and a driver of Buicks, Dad knew a thing or two not only about engines, but most importantly he knew which guys were the top of the heap in mechanical knowledge. Dad once had a John Deere technician who would lean his head into the pop-pop-pop of a two-cylinder green machine and say, “You hear that? You hear that?” His name was Rodway and no one but Rodway could actually hear whatever he was hearing, but Rod was always right. He’d shut off the engine, make a few adjustments and send the 70 John Deere down the road. Men like that were greatly admired in small communities since it was the horse that powered Grandpa’s village and the motor that made Dad’s town go. If you knew how to make either the nag or the Ford 8N work, you were at the top of the town’s pecking order. Of course the horse is now relegated to exhibition or pleasure status, and it’s the rare mechanic who can understand the workings of a car’s computer-driven system. In fact, I’ve had more than one mechanic tell me that the auto manufacturers have carefully conspired to form a cabal insuring that no one but their dealers can do repairs. So with the knowledge of horses and cars no longer a coveted commodity in our world, how do we determine the new pecking order? There’s no contest: It’s the geek…the techno-nerd…the computer guy. I’m a middle-runger myself. There are folks whom I turn to for help and a much smaller crowd who turn to me to aid with their computers. I entered the techno world about seven computers ago and although it’s a cliché to state it, it’s pretty much changed how I work, live and exist. I buy fewer stamps, I cut down on my news subscriptions, I can now find documents I’ve misplaced, and I tossed my file cabinet into the trash. And being in the middle of the pecking order of knowledge, I can occasionally help out someone a few rungs below me on the computer ladder. But let me state again, I am totally dependent upon the handful of Super Geeks whom I know. Two guys reside in the stratified atmosphere of my geek universe: my nephew Doug and a kid named Cory. Both wrestle technology for a living, but Doug is often in conference or hiking through the untamed wilderness of Canada so when I get flummoxed sitting in front of my monitor, I call Cory. How do I describe this tall, grinning ex-Winchester super geek? I’ll begin by saying that his brain is wired for the 21st century while mine lolls lazily around the 1960’s. He’s “into” things that I will never know and have little desire to understand. That’s cool. It’s Cory’s world now and not mine. In fact, he’s so into it that I sometimes have to slap him (metaphorically speaking) to get him to focus on anything but the speed of his fingers on a keyboard. I once had him take over for me on a long drive to Arkansas. Zipping through the St. Louis interstates and despite the killer traffic, his fingers kept pushing the buttons on the dashboard of my car. He didn’t even know he was doing it. When his fingers awoke in the morning they began moving and I think I heard them tapping on the pillow while he slept in our Arkansas hotel. Cory dragged me out of the tangled and cumbersome world of the PC into the bright light of the Mac computer so now we speak the same language, and whenever I’m totally discombobulated by a computer glitch I swallow my pride and give Cory a call. From a distance of 40 miles, Cory crawls inside my computer and my mouse starts moving under his direction. Visualize a crazed rat on caffeine. My pointer zips around the screen like a banshee and within seconds he’s repaired whatever awful thing I’ve done to my computer. I used to ask him to talk me through it, but Cory talks too fast and uses a vocabulary that’s often only weeks old. I give up and tell him to just take my horse and fix it. Inside a minute my computer’s humming like it should and I politely climb down two more rungs on the pecking order.