I read this article and synapses were fired and I remembered an event I have not thought about in years.

In the summer of 2006, I flew out to Portland by myself to stay with relatives for a couple of weeks. All things considered, it was a pretty great trip, but I was just a little too young to truly appreciate the experience or basically do anything other than be ungracious. Which I was.

At one point I was meeting my aunt’s neighbor and I was just beside myself because this guy seemed like the coolest person alive. He read comics! He did computer things! Of course twelve-year-old me would adopt this guy as my role model! (For reference, I spent the rest of that trip listening to Lemon Demon and— oh, jeez, am I really going to admit this?— posting my writing on the Megatokyo forums. My avatar was a Jhonen Vasquez drawing I colored in Paint. I was quite possibly the Worst Child Alive.)

So at one point I asked my new hero what he did for a living, and he told me that he was a “Windows guru” and I was just floored. A guru? Like, Mr. Miyagi? How much of a badass do you have to be to get the job title guru? What the hell kind of test is there to become a “Windows guru”? Do you have to face off against Bill Gates in his private dojo, armed with those bamboo sword things that I would know the name of if I were still twelve years old? I guess it’s Steve Ballmer, these days. Probably more of a challenge. Wait, isn’t guru Hindi in origin? Maybe I’m thinking of sensei. “Windows sensei”. Now that is something I would put on a business card.

Anyway, I realize now that this guy was less of a rock star computer god and more of an unemployed nerd. Which means that a little piece of twelve-year-old me just died.

But not enough, dammit.