It's Ben. Here's what I'm doing now.
If a text arrived from a number you didn't recognise, it was me. Here's what I do now, in plain terms.
If you got a text from a number you didn’t recognise and it claimed to be me — it was me.
Years ago I ran PC Paramedics in Anchorage, and I still have the contact list from those years. It has followed me through four computers and two moves, and I finally sat down and went through it by hand. Some of the names I remember perfectly. Some are a first name, a 907 number, and a clear feeling that we got on. A few are spelled the way I typed them in 2009, which is to say badly, so if I mangled yours, that’s mine to apologise for.
Nobody sold me your number. There’s no company behind this, no list I bought, no software deciding who gets contacted. It’s me, at a kitchen table, working down a list of people I used to know and let go quiet.
You don’t have to do anything with this page. It’s here so the text makes sense.
What I do now
I fix computers for people. That’s the whole business, and it’s just me — no office, no staff, no ticket system that loses you between departments. It’s called My Computer Therapy.
Most of the work is ordinary, and I like it that way. A laptop that got slow. WiFi that dies in the back bedroom. A printer that has decided, for reasons of its own, to stop. Twenty years of photos stuck on a phone nobody can get them off. A password nobody wrote down. Somebody’s mother who needs the same thing explained three times and shouldn’t be made to feel stupid about it.
Most of it I can now do remotely, which means it doesn’t much matter where either of us is sitting. Some of it still wants hands on the machine, and I go out in person for that by arrangement.
The part I actually care about is the second half of every job — the bit where I tell you what went wrong and why, in words that mean something, so that next time you’re not helpless. If you never have to call me again, I did it right. That’s the therapy part, and it isn’t a joke.
If you want the longer version, it’s on the about page, and what I actually fix is listed plainly.
The other thing I got into
Somewhere in the last few years I got stubborn about owning my own infrastructure.
My email doesn’t run on Google. My files don’t live in somebody else’s cloud. My backups sit on hardware I can put my hand on. When a company changes its terms, or triples its price, or decides on a Tuesday that my account looks suspicious, none of it reaches me — because none of it was ever theirs to switch off.
That started as a personal itch and turned into most of what I build now: mail servers, home networks that keep working when the internet doesn’t, backups that have actually been restored rather than merely configured. I write some of it down in field notes when I think it’ll help somebody.
Why I got back in touch
Two honest reasons.
The first is plain. I’m at the age where I’ve noticed which people I actually think about, and a lot of them are in Alaska, and I let too many of them go quiet. That’s on me, not on you. A text message is a small thing, but it was the thing I could actually do this week.
The second is that I’m putting together a few days, in person, small group, where you leave running your own email — your own domain, your own mail server, off Google and Microsoft entirely, and understanding every piece of it rather than taking my word that it works.
I’m offering it to the Alaska list first, on purpose, before anybody else. Here’s what it actually is.
If you’d rather I didn’t
Reply STOP to the text and I’ll take you off. No hard feelings, nothing to explain. Or just don’t answer — I’ll take the hint, and I won’t chase you.
And if you’d rather skip all of the above and just say hello, that works too. I’m on 808-647-2304, or aloha@mycomputertherapy.com. I’d genuinely like to hear how you are.