My mother lost an office job (to which she felt little attachment) to downsizing earlier this year, and she's not quite financially prepared for retirement. Fortunately, the terms of her severance include vocational training. She has been a hobbyist photographer off and on for my entire life, going so far as to have her own darkroom until I was nearly ten. Whatever complaints I may have about my childhood, it was beautifully photographed.

With the advent of digital photography, she has become interested in photography again, though this time, she has a G4 rather than a darkroom. It suits her as well as film ever did.

Given this confluence of events, my mother has (rather sensibly) decided to get her vocational training in desktop and Web design and publishing. This will give her the possibilities of a creative outlet and a supplemental income. It's nice when things work out that way. However, she will have to become not just comfortable with but knowledgeable about computers, and that might be enough to undermine everything.

Listening to her struggle with the unforgiving literalness of her computer, trying to help where I can, I'm reminded of what I learned during the Internet-driven boom in the computer industry: Work with computers only if you really love working with computers. Don't assume that because you enjoy creating tables in a word processor or writing macros in a spreadsheet, you would be happy as a developer. If you find yourself compelled to install Linux on your PC or understand all of the code underlying your Weblog--that is, if you would be fiddling with computers even if someone didn't pay you to do so--then by all means, become a developer. Otherwise, save yourself and those who would work with you a great deal of unpleasantness.

My guess is that many of the jobs lost during the recent contraction of the computer industry were held by dilettante MBAs who thought this field offered better professional opportunities than law or management consulting. They can't have been happy (or particularly competent) at their jobs. Computers aren't just another tool (not yet anyway) or another resource to be managed. And it's not that geeks happen to have a certain affinity for computers. Rather, working with computers--the particular combination of detailed specificity and grand abstraction that requires--forces you to be a geek. So enter the field at your own peril. You will be found out if you're not a geek.