the internets are my ninja weapon

I'm a trained geek, but my technology still overwhelms me on occasion. When this happens, the Internets are my ninja weapon. Today I needed to edit a Word document, but a bunch of the fields were password-locked by some long-lost author. Fortunately Google knew that I would need to see Microsoft Word Protection Bypass. I had never hex-edited a Word doc before, but Google knew where I could download several tools for this, such as the simple and elegant HexEdit. Elapsed time: < 10 minutes.

Another trivial example. After the crash, I got my laptop rebuilt but it was still throwing a tantrum because of a missing driver on an unknown piece of hardware. The only clue I had was this cryptic string in Device Manager, "ACPI\WEC0518". Mostly out of desperation I searched on this string, which brought me to the exact forum post where someone else had the same problem solved. W00tsky! Elapsed time: < 10 minutes.

I'm pretty certain I would never have sorted either of these problems on my own. How I ever survived without the Internets is a mystery to me. Thanks to everyone out there making all that great UGC, you've truly made my life better!