A Computer Repair Adventure

“So Pete, you find that gremlin yet?”

I looked behind me to see Liam, who was grinning at me from the doorway of the server room, the bright lights glinting off his mostly bald head. The servers themselves were humming along merrily, all except the one I was working on. It was just sitting there, completely inert. I had checked the power supply, the memory, the hard drives, the CPU, all of it. Everything checked out and passed every test. Yet it just refused to turn on.

“No gremlins, although I’m almost ready to believe in them. There’s something I’m missing here, but I can’t figure out what.”

“I tell ya boyo, it’s the little people,” Liam said in his best Irish accent. The guy was third generation American and had never been to Ireland in his life, but he loved playing up his heritage. “You need to feed your fairies, if you want to keep them happy.”

“I need to feed myself,” I said, my stomach rumbling. It was well past noon, but I didn’t have time to eat with the server down. “I can’t though, I need to get this working.”

“You have that red lunch bag, right? If you want, I can get it for you from the fridge.”

“Hey thanks, that would be great,” I said. I wouldn’t be able to eat the sandwich in the server room because of the crumbs, but I had a banana that would be safe.

“Sure thing boyo, happy to help.”

He headed off to the break room, and I went back to work. He returned a few minutes later with my lunch bag. I thanked him again, took a couple bites of the banana, and set it down on the bag as I returned to the innards of the machine.

The connections looked good. None of the memory chips had become unseated. I was examining the power couplings again when I saw movement out of the corner of my eye. I looked down and saw the impossible.

It was a tiny man, barely three inches tall, dressed in a light green jacket, with green knickers and a pointed blue cap. His pointy nose stuck well out from his bearded face. He was just sitting there, munching on the end of my banana. I closed my eyes and opened them again. He was still there. He couldn’t be, but he was. He looked up at me. I looked back at him. He grinned and vanished. The server turned on.

I stood slowly, staring down at the machine. It was humming along as though it had never had a problem.

“Hey, you got it working,” said Pete as he stuck his head in through the door. “How did you do it?”

I slowly turned and looked at him.

“I found the gremlin.”