I was an English major, and now I’m a doctoral student in Psychology. I don’t do computers – I do people. But I’m completely dependent on computers, and when mine doesn’t do what I need it to do when I need to do it, I become overwhelmed and desperate in all of thirty seconds. Michael Crawford is the only computer person I have ever met who can manage to talk me off the ledge, make sense of my frantic description of the problem, and explain how to fix it, all in about five minutes. If it’s too complicated for him to talk me through it he comes over and does it for me. He’s great at explaining as he goes, so I can learn how to do it myself later. If I don’t care to expand my knowledge and I just want him to “make it go away,” he does that, too. He somehow manages to protect my ego all the while by assuring me that really the thing I don’t understand is pretty complicated, and my failure to grasp it has nothing to do with my intelligence. At this point, I’m considering listing him as second author on my dissertation, because I would not have gotten it written without him.

R. H.    Fall 2008    Houston, Texas