[Several years ago I wrote a Thanksgiving piece that I liked very much. In my mind it belonged in Readers Digest, or Chicken Soup for the Computer User, or someplace. I never understood why it wasn't more successful, where it went wrong. This year, I'm putting it back in play, hoping it catches fire.]

This piece is for all the good folks who know a tiny bit more about computers than the people you work with or live near, and are thus designated a "techie guru."

If you are such, you know the drill. People ask you for help. You say you doubt you can be much help. You worry that your modicum of expertise is going to be just enough to torpedo the relationship. But you try, and occasionally things work out.

Like this past weekend. A neighbor called with a software problem involving Lotus Ami Pro 2.0 -- a version that came out ages -- eleven years! -- ago. Every time she started it up, it crashed. Worse, she thought she'd lost all her data.

So we talked. She needed disk space, so I helped her delete some unused programs. She hadn't lost her data files; her program just forgot where to look for them. Then we set up an automatic backup file to protect future data.

It took about 50 minutes. When we hung up our phones, I was somewhat confident I had helped, which was better than I usually do.

But I was not prepared for my payment. Later that day she stopped by and handed over to me, covered with a warm cloth, a fresh baked apple pie, made the old way, from scratch. I was taken aback. In all my years of talking people down from techie ledges, no one ever made me a baked good.

I set it on the kitchen table and just stared at it. I looked. I smelled. I blinked.

Friends, to a tech-head chained to a cubicle, an apple pie is a miracle. It is pure analog information, like a dog or a galosh or cinder block. Reverse-engineer it and you journey backward from the oven to a grocer, in crates and trucks, to an orchard where seeds form stars in the heart of each fruit, and a farm where wheat berries dangle on their stems, dreaming dreams of piecrust and lard.

I now knew how the prophets felt, healing ten lepers and only one returning to say thanks. This irrespective of how you feel about apple pie made by a leper.

This pie, I told myself, made up for all the phone calls during supper, the interrupted ball games, the times I bit my lip to keep from calling someone I ordinarily respected an imbecile, just because conversation had shifted to technology.

It makes up for going unloved, because we love the machines in front of us too much. It makes up for the countless Pepsis and Doritos that fuel our endeavors. It makes up for the stunted career tracks, the jokes about our glasses, the humiliating moments at parties when you're introduced as a computer wizard, and everyone arches their eyebrows in pity.

We techie gurus have no need of silk sheets or a punkawalla to fan away flies. We pitch our tents wherever there are users getting FATAL ERROR messages. We will be welcome wherever people gnash their teeth and curse the technical support queue.

We are like those saints of the snow who are out there when your wheels are spinning, and we put our shoulder to your bumper and lift you up and get you going again, and before you can roll down your window and shout your thank-you over the engine whine and wind, we are gone, gone to do some other good turn.

So I would like to make the pie a gift to all of you out there who wear the techie turban. Picture the pie by a frosty window, steam and sugar rising from it like the shimmering branches of a virtual tree, the ghostly arms offering up a prayer of thanks.

So flaky and so sweet, this pie's for you.