I used to be a good troubleshooter...

....and then I started to date, then married someone who is an even bigger computer geek than I ever was!

I have an external drive connected to my laptop that backs-up my computer each night. Tuesday morning, I noticed that my computer was unable to read the drive, and the only option I had was to initialize the disk. Well, that's never my first choice, so I decided to restart my computer a few times, and re-connect the drive. No go. It didn't work at all.

I considered reinitializing the entire disk, but decided not to do anything until the weekend. A full backup of my drive takes a bit longer than 24 hours, and I didn't want it to disrupt my work for an entire day (or two). I figured I'd have Dick look it over during the weekend, and if I still needed to initialize the disk, I would just leave my computer alone for the entire weekend.

This morning, I asked Dick what he thought I should do. I asked, "Should I just initialize? It hasn't been able to read the disk all week."

He said he'd come up to look at it. I asked if he wanted me to restart my computer, and disconnect an re-connect the drive.

He said he'd just turn it off, and on again first.

....then he left the room.

....then my external hard drive showed itself on my desktop, all fine and happy...

...and I felt like an idiot.

I should have known this! This is the first thing I should have tried after restarting my computer didn't work.

Why is it that I rely so heavily on Dick's geekdome, that I've relaxed my own inner-geek, and can't step up to the plate to figure these things out for myself?

It's like there's some weird geeky-comfort knowing that Dick can fix things. I used to be the one my friends would call for computer questions! I used to be able to figure stuff out like this all the time. This is not difficult.

I've become the techie-geek damsel in distress because I married a knight in geeky armor.

Shame on me. Time to step things up, and become my own geek again.

Dick just walked back in, and read my blog.

He said that Craddock's First Law is "When in doubt, power cycle."

I should write that down.

Oh, I'm so embarrassed!