The lights are focused and gloved fingers ply inside the belly with a tong of forceps. The blood soaked sponge keeps the operating area clean and visible. Dr. Silly would be in his elements with such a gory sight. It would not curdle up his blood. It is said that appendix is the bread and butter of a surgeon. One appendix is bread and more number of appendices he removes the more butter it brings to his family. No wonder a patient who was found gripping his belly with pain, hardly able to speak, was found to carry in his pocket a note: “Doctor, please do not remove my appendix. It has been removed thrice.” But here was a strange spectacle inside Dr. Silly’s consulting room. What was Dr. Silly doing in his own consulting room, kneeling down, kowtowing, head almost touching the floor, and gaze turned upwards at the cabinet box of CPU? I admit he was at a liberty to do any thing in his own consulting room, as long as he was alone. But the human mind is inquisitive and this strange position that is not described in any of the kamsutra positions would perplex anybody. His consulting room had the same lavish ambience that you find in the Crystal Ball Room of the five star hotel of Taj International Group. Just awesome!
Dr. Silly in his plush consulting room was tinkering with the innards of his desk top computer’s CPU. The operation carried out using some assorted set of screwdrivers seemed to be over. Out came the hard disk and out came the ram. Dr. Silly wiped the sweat off his face and slumped in his luxurious chair. His face showed a mixture of triumph and dismay. We can allow Dr. Silly the joy of triumph for anybody would attest that ordinarily he would not have even opened a torch to replace the battery inside. The hardware engineer told Dr. Silly his verdict, “Your hard disk is conked off and there has been a short circuit. Your ram is singed.” Dr. Silly admitted that he smelt something burning when he was meddling with the insides of the computer in the head down, bottom up position. He then quickly switched off the computer and finally found he had inserted the ram in the slot in a direction opposite to what should have been.
A smartass who plays nasty pranks on other person’s computer while logged in to his own laptop, and hiding somewhere in the World Wide Web would be called a ‘hacker’. What is the opposite of ‘hacker’? What would you call him who cannot log in his own website’s control panel or cannot prevent his own website’s domain name from being usurped by some one else? I would not call him ‘naïve’. Can you figure out an antonym for ‘hacker’? If you can’t, don’t rake your brains. Moreover, you will not find it in any of the world’s books of Thesaurus, so don’t waste time searching for it in Google. I will disclose to you the word that best describes the opposite of ‘hacker’, but first let us finish with Dr. Silly’s story. Let us spill the secret.
What was the emergency that made Dr. Silly kowtow in the humble Buddhist posture of meditation to work with the screw driver?
Dr. Silly’s plight was that his computer, his internet connectivity and his websites were all in critical condition. His domain name was likely to be sabotaged. His website did not show up on the internet for several days. Dr. Silly’s websites are registered on someone else’s name and in the God’s world he does not know how to get it transferred to his own name while renewing the domain registration. He faced all this despite having paid five years fees for domain name renewal before the date of expiration. Expiration, Dr. Silly knew was a deadly sin in medical practice. Adding to this misery, [you will know when it happens to you] was the pitiable condition of his computer, which was bereft of hard disk and all his precious data. He is at sixes and sevens when it comes to computronics in the web world. I do not mean things that are complicated and difficult where a geek can say to his colleague, “It’s elementary, Dr. Watson.” I hope you understand I am talking of as simple things as writing your name on your own notebook.
Let us allow Dr. Silly his sense of achievement because despite the damaged hard disk and lost data, he did manage to boot his computer using a Live CD Ubuntu Linux, which was an antique outdated version, but functional. Fellow geeks and well wishers on the other side of the continent came to his rescue. He is grateful to them and glad about it.
But my question remains unanswered, “What do you call such a nut? What is the antonym for ‘hacker’?” I will call him ‘sacker’ until you come up with a better name. The word ‘sacker’, pronounced today is historical, a new addition to English language, a word that will find a place in Thesaurus henceforth. And what is the antonym of the word ‘Thesaurus’? Never mind. Let us not scratch the cerebral cortex or cortices too much.