The hotel front desk directed my driver to a computer dealer. We drove out of the hotel district, and cruised through neighborhoods crammed with shops for baskets, teak furniture and kites. When we passed some beautifully manicured rice fields, I really thought I had made a poor decision, since we were in rural Indonesia. We finally got to the computer store, and a woman there directed us to the computer repair part of the establishment, which was in a shed packed with pool tables. It looked to me like the most out-of-control high-tech service center anywhere in the world. It was like a computer graveyard, with parts strewn all over the place. To say I was a little concerned is an understatement.

No one seemed to speak English, but an older man finally pointed to a teenage boy who apparently could help me. The young man quickly said my computer wasn’t booting up, which didn’t give me much confidence, since I already knew that. But I asked him if he thought he could fix it. He smiled and took my laptop.

Instead of using that magic electronic tester that I saw computer repair people use at my shop back home, this young man began tapping on my computer’s plastic shell with his fingers. It reminded me of how I used to check the backs of my older patients for pneumonia. He then put his ear down on the computer’s surface, which made my blood pressure rise even more. I could not figure out what this young man was doing since he was doing absolutely nothing high tech. It was really more like he was performing a deep Balinese massage on my computer. I nearly lost my mind when he started to take it apart. Screws were all over the place, and he was jiggling wires and jamming connections together. I thought everything on my computer was lost.

But then he put the cover back, flipped the switch, and everything was fixed. Best of all, nothing was lost. I would have paid him anything, but he only asked for 20,000 rupiah, which was at the time about $3.18 in American dollars. I gave him much more.