My husband, the geek

For somebody who spends the better part of her day on the computer, my tastes are very simple when it comes to media. Perhaps you could even call me a Luddite. I prefer vinyl albums to MP3s because I enjoy handling jackets, removing whatever I’m about to play from its cover, putting it on the turntable, and placing the needle. I even enjoy the scratchy sound. I got my last cell phone on Freecycle and was perfectly content with it until it stopped holding a charge. I never noticed how small our 19 inch TV was until my husband had been complaining for a very long time. In fact, if I was the only adult in the house, we probably wouldn’t even have cable. Or a video game system.

But I married somebody who loves knowing everything about the

newest and best technology. For a long time, his love of gadgets and computer parts burned with a white-hot passion deep in his heart, but we could never justify the expense of the newest and best of anything. Still, occasional purchases made their way into the house, like a slightly better 19 inch TV, and series of game machines, which I accepted with no small amount of consternation. I never wanted my kids to play video games and have only begrudgingly allowed the various machines into the house at all because of Jon’s puppy dog eyes and emotional arguments about bonding time with his sons, blahblahblah.

Still, our budget being what it was and not having a lot of wiggle room for that kind of stuff, we managed to keep the influx under control for a long time. And then he got his new job, where in lieu of 401K or stock options, his boss seems to pay benefits in the form of toys. One week he came home with a new Apple laptop. The next month it was an iPhone. Keyboards, motherboards, earphones; you name it, he’s brought it home. And now that the switch to Apple is complete, PC is apparently no longer good enough for him and he’s relentlessly trying to convince me to switch to a Mac. But I’m perfectly happy with my trusty old beaten-up Dell!

He’ll point at the keyboard. “Look, it’s so OLD,” he’ll say. “The space bar has a DENT in it.” But I don’t mind. I kind of like that you can see where my thumb has been beating on my keyboard for the last two years, leaving a small indentation. Or that the M and N and L are worn right off the keys. Another thing that makes him nuts? My desktop. We have had actual fights over the fact that I have icons stretching out all the way across my computer desktop, which is actually part of my strange filing system (if I’m working on something and it doesn’t fit into a folder, it goes to the desktop. It makes sense in my brain, anyway).

And the other day, the rubber casing on my power cord wore away. “You need to stop being so rough on your electronics,” he said, looking wounded as he held up the frayed wires. Easy for him to say. He doesn’t have kids crawling all over him while he’s trying to work. HE doesn’t have to grab every opportunity he can to write, even when it meant typing in the lying-down-nursing position with the laptop on its side.

When it comes down to it, though, I guess we balance one another out. I like rooms filled with books and pretty things, and he likes them filled with instruction manuals and geeky things. Before we have guests over, only he takes the time to lovingly dust all the electronics and straighten all the wires behind the TV while I run around doing pointless things like mopping and cleaning toilets. I break computer parts, he fixes them. And that’s a good thing, because I’m pretty sure I just got some food wedged under my spacebar.

Again.