The microwave wasn’t the only machine that died.
The week before all the medical drama unfolded, I received a panicked call from my mother...
“My computer won’t turn on.”
Back in the late ‘90’s, my mother decided to get a computer. My father was already retired and had no interest in learning anything new, but all my mother’s friends had e-mail and she wanted it too. As a loyal Mac user, I suggested she get an new iMac. My brother-in-law tried to lure her to the Dark Side and a PC. It was a battle of wits that I ultimately won and later came to regret.
What I didn’t anticipate was that I would become her de facto IT department. For years I fielded anguished phone calls anytime something went wrong. Often it was something simple like a loose cable and I could talk her down on the phone. Anything more complicated than that was impossible. I’d try and talk her through some troubleshooting tips and she acted as if she was being called on to defuse a nuclear warhead. So, more often than not, it required an emergency trip to the OC. More than once I even made the drive down on my lunch hour when my distraught mother insisted she couldn’t survive until the weekend without e-mail. At the end of the day, it was almost never an actual computer problem. She has a bad habit of inadvertently dragging folders into folders and then when things disappear she panics and just starts randomly clicking things. My job then becomes untying the knot.
But then she found Cindy.
I don’t know how she found her, or where. But Cindy proved to be a lifesaver. Cindy is a Mac expert who makes house calls at a reasonable rate. My mom has used her for two or three years now. She evidently has a day job, because she’s only available evenings. It wasn’t unusual for her to show up at 9 or 10 at night.
My mother loves Cindy.
“She just so nice and so patient with me. I don’t know what I’d do without her.”
I’d never met her, but I’d heard all about her.
“She’s really quite stylish” my mom would say. “I don’t know where she works during the day, but she’s always so so well dressed when she shows up here.”
When I first got here weeks ago, I took a look at the computer. I’ve worked on Macs for 20 years and can handle minor troubleshooting and repairs, but I couldn’t even get the computer to turn on.
“Call Cindy” said my mom.
So finally, Thursday, I gave her a call.
She was nice and pleasant on the phone. She said it was probably one of two things. Either there was an issue with the power source, which was fixable. Or it was bad logic board, a terminal failure. She said she’d come by Friday evening to check it out.
Last night I was out having a smoke in my parent’s covered entryway. A light rain was falling when up pulled a cherry red late 90’s Camaro. In the dim street light I saw a woman step out of the car.
Cindy.
She was tall; my mother mentioned she was tall. She was wearing a skin tight, knee length red pencil skirt and high black stiletto heels. Long, straight blond her fell over a white blouse and her black wrap. She carried a sparkly clutch purse and looked like she was headed out for a night on the town. As she clicked up the front walk in her impossible heels and stepped into the front porch lights, one thing was clear.
Cindy was a man.
I’m gay, I notice these things.
Although with Cindy it was hard to miss. She looked to be in her early 40's. She was at least 6’4” without the heels and towered over me in them. She had heavy, masculine facial features which she’d slathered with kabuki style makeup. The hair was obviously a wig, and a bad one at that. And then there was the prominent Adam’s apple.
I was momentarily thrown but quickly recovered. I invited her in and she greeted my parents warmly. They obviously had no clue.
I walked her back to the den where the computer was and she quickly got down to work. She whipped out a screwdriver from her clutch opened the computer and immediately saw that the logic board was shot. There’s wasn’t much she could do. The computer was 6 years old and had run it’s course. She advised my folks to get a new computer and she would come back and and transfer everything onto the new machine. And just like that, she was gone.
So this morning we’re off to the Apple store, a luxury I don’t have in Bako since the closest store is 100 miles away. We’re getting them a new iMac and Cindy is coming back Monday evening, after I leave, to get it all set up.
I’ve debated whether or not to tell them.
Oh the one hand, I can’t imagine it would be a problem for them. They never had a problem with me being gay and they’ve accepted my boyfriend as part of the family. In fact I think my mother views him as the daughter she wished she had. Several of my cousins are gay, and the conventional family wisdom is that it’s all somehow genetic and not a big deal. And the old flaming queens at my mother’s hair salon are like a second family to her.
But somehow, this is... different.
I don’t believe they’ve ever encountered Chicks with Dicks. And maybe it’s best they never know they already have. I think it would alter how they feel about Cindy, and I don’t think that would be fair to her.
So I’ve decided to let sleeping trannies lie and leave it at that.
