Changing the Narrative
A short story
I met her at a five-dollar-latte café in Park Ridge, Illinois. One of those Chicago suburbs lashed with overhead wires, strip malls, and crisscrossing asphalt arteries. The kind of town whose best feature is serving as a portal to somewhere else.
Stuck in traffic, I fiddled with the radio. Turning my head, I saw an oversized coffee cup hanging from a shop awning. The sign said, Viva Café. Coffee. That’s what I needed, so I pulled my orange and black computer geek car off the main drag, and into the café’s parking lot. Tried, unsuccessfully, to park the car out of sight of the café’s windows to avoid the inevitable wisecracks and jokes.
There was always one.
I’m that guy. The geeky IT tech that people call after the cat spills coffee on their laptop. There is no hiding that. Sometimes, an uptight suburbanite will try to convince me it was the recent power outage that caused their computer to crash, when I can tell the computer was dropped. And then there is the client who blames his favorite video game for locking up the screen, never guessing I can see his porn site history for the last week, and know what really jammed up the works.
Mine is a profession founded upon involuntary voyeurism. There is no way to pry a hard drive from someone’s computer without taking a high dive into their…
