Part 1: The Geek Squad Can't Fix Everything

Well, as promised, I'd like to start the tale of how this life of mine came to be. Look for an installment every Friday going forward, and I look forward to your heckling and comments along the way. 

It all started April 5, 2006. I was living in a little two bedroom apartment with my then girlfriend (we will call her Megan), and working for the Geek Squad at the Best Buy in Tampa Florida. It was a pretty humdrum experience, I certainly wasn't making much even though I thought the work was somewhat stimulating intellectually. It was pretty cool to face down 50 different problems on 50 different computers through the course of my day. Our location was such that we even had the occasional celebrity come in and pay us a visit with their technological problems. For the record, Dwayne Johnson (a.k.a. The Rock) is actually pretty technically savvy and very down to Earth. He also plays World of Warcraft, but I don't remember the server or anything, I'm more of an RTS kind of guy.

I wasn't rich but at the same time I was getting by decently for a guy with a 9 to 5 and an expensive girlfriend. Things were going along pretty well until one day Megan came to the stunning realization that somebody has been embedding microchips into her skin to slowly suck her soul away. One of the coolest things in the world is the fact that I can find some humor in that looking back now. But at the time, I was faced with watching the woman I loved so dearly slip away to schizophrenia. She was always a little quirky, I've always had a preference for eccentric people in my life. So I first, I made the terrible mistake of thinking that the changes she was undergoing was just a phase that she would snap out of any minute. But minutes turned into hours, those hours then turned into days, the days melted into weeks, and the weeks one day became three months. Every day was like trying to talk somebody down from a bad hallucinogenic experience, and out of my devotion to her I probably could've done it for years.

But she turned on me…

One night, after coming home from a very long day at work, I found her on the floor in a fetal position sobbing nonstop. This was the first time in those three months she ever expressed any real suffering at this magnitude. So I scooped her up, carried her onto the bed, started brewing up her favorite tea, and put some soothing music on. When I came back to the bedroom she was sitting up in bed and began to tell me a story about how one of her ex-boyfriends from high school came into the shower with her that night. This guy was over 3000 miles away and she hadn't seen him in over 10 years, so her hallucinations were obviously getting worse. I knew that I was in over my head, I had to let go. I had to find her professional help because this was no phase, this was something that I had no experience with at all and therefore no business messing with it.

I kissed the top of her head, and I told her that everything was going to be okay. The next day we were going to find a doctor for her, and through either chemicals or therapy everything was going to be set right again. The reaction I got wasn't what I expected. She looked up at me with such a twisted and almost ghoulish expression of hatred and anger and screamed at the top of her lungs "who the FUCK are you?!?!” This obviously threw me back a little bit, she and I had been together for five years through some very good times and many very bad times. The crush we had on each other never wore out. But now here she was in a genuinely psychotic rage and all the anger and frustration that she'd been feeling for the past three months was now focused on me like a laser. She ran off the bed and into the kitchen and grabbed a damn steak knife.…

(To Be Continued)

Click Here for Part Two