I might say I'm pretty pleased with myself today at work. Before I could even set my backpack down, the powers-that-be threw a computer problem at me: two computers in the office could connect to the local network, but couldn't connect to the internet. The pressure was on.

Now, whenever someone comes to me with a computer problem, I always try my best to be helpful. It's just that, well, I have this theory about people and their computer skill. I believe that people who are content with the world, people who are slobs, who will just let things be — those people suck when it comes to using computers. It's the anal retentive people, the micromanagers, the people who want to change every possible thing who are good with computers. They want — no — they need their Dell or Gateway or iMac to look, feel, and behave a particular way, exactly, so they check out every menu option, click on every icon to find all the combinations and permutations in which they can customize their machines. That's how I learned to use a computer. And it's a phlegmatic way to learn, except that you look like a moron when someone asks you to solve a problem you've never seen before.

So, I knew there was some sort of network problem, and I know there's a Network Connections control panel. That seems like a good place to start. Right-click on "Local Area Connection," select Properties, choose the thing that says "TCP/IP something something" from the dialog box that comes up, click Properties, and hmm...

I've never needed to manually set the DNS server address before. I wonder why they manually set theirs. Let's compare this setting to that of a working computer.... They don't match. The working computer has DHCP assigning it a DNS address, so maybe there's a DNS problem. Let's change that setting. It works!

I'm so proud of myself. Of course, then they asked to debug some print server problem that left me stymied.