Computer Repair, Cowboy Style

Today’s post is a guest post from Kevin Weatherby. Kevin is a cowboy by trade and a pastor by calling and has some fantastic stories and insights and a wonderful ability to link stories from ‘the ranch‘ to real life spiritual applications.

Here’s one that caught my eye recently and Kevin kindly agreed to re-write it to better suit my tech blog. Thanks Kevin.

My friend Stuart asked me to pass along a few high tech cowboy tips and pointers post. I am always willing to help people out where and when I can. Today’s lesson will be on computer repair. There is a right way and a wrong way to get things done….I’ll leave you to decide which one this might be.

When you live 30 miles from the nearest anywhere, you learn to use a variety of things in a variety of situations. Cowboys can figure out how to fix items, or at least patch them, with the simplest things he has laying around.

I had lightning strike the house about 5 years ago and ruined my computer. I know I should have had a surge protector, but it was outside running the air compressor, the drill, two heat lamps, a fountain pump, a weedeater, a radio, a kick-butt chair massager, a battery charger, two ceiling fans, a burned up coffee maker, a curlin’ iron, and a cell phone charger.

Well, this computer wasn’t working, so I didn’t figure I would break it by trying to fix it. It was already fried. I opened it up to see if anything was wrong. The whole durn thing looked like a rainbow bright rat’s nest with all the colorful wires and green boards. I didn’t know the first thing about what any of that stuff did or where to begin. The whole thing looked broken to me. I couldn’t even find the cards from the Solitaire Game that I played so much. But I did find one of the mines from minesweeper. It looked remarkably like a mouse turd.

I figured I would just start where the cord went in the back. I had to take out about fourteen screws the size of a pencil lead just to get into the little box where the cord goes. I didn’t have a screwdriver that small so I just took a hacksaw and opened it like everyone else does. That is how ya’ll would do it, right?

Anyway, the first thing I saw in this little box was a fuse. It was not a big fuse, but it didn’t take an electrical jeanius to see that the durned thing was blown. I had never seen a fuse like this in my whole life. I didn’t know where I was going to find a “little weird computer fuse” store. So I did the next best thing. I made one out of baling wire.

All a fuse does is make electricity go from one side of it to another. Wire will do that. I went out to the horse pens and got some wire that was tied up there. I didn’t use the good stuff, I used the real rusty batch. It didn’t have to be pretty. It just had to run a little electricity. I taped that little piece of baling wire on the outside of that fuse and secured it with a little piece of duct tape. It’s very hard to get a piece of duct tape that small. I was afraid at one point I was going to have to get some bubble gum to make the wire stay put.

In the end though, the toughest part was getting the blasted thing back together, not fixing it. I had hacksawed all the little screws off and I couldn’t figure out how to get the cover back on. If I hadn’t seen that cover come off there with my own two eyes, I would have bet you a good dog that the cover was off something else.

I plugged the computer in and hit the magic button. The thing fired right up and I used it for about three more years.

Now that baling wire was not ever intended to be used to fix a computer. It might have worked out alright, but that definitely was not the tool for the job. I learned two things from that close encounter with the computer kind.

The first is to not be afraid to dive into something you don’t know anything about. You might surprise yourself with what you can do.

The second is that if you have to use a hacksaw to get into something, you should probably stay out of it. Let someone that knows what they are doing get the job done right the first time–without duct tape and rusted wire from a horse pen.