AP- Seattle, Washington, April 22, 2007- Breaking news: Computers aren’t the only thing Steve Teixeira can do. He’s an expert electrician and contractor but prefers the less strenous job of writing code. Steve Teixeira, of Seattle, is a group program manager for Microsoft and explains just how his job saved his life. ” When you’re pressing keys all day, you develop curiously strong fingers.” says Teixeira “It really helps in all aspects of your life though. There’s nothing these fingers can’t do.”

This proved true this weekend when those curiously strong fingers came in handy. Steve’s wife, Helen, asked him to climb onto the roof and clean off the skylights and remove some branches laying on their two story home in Seattle. Steve is 6′5″ tall and weighs about 240 pounds. Steve adds “People think just because you’re tall you like to get up on ladders. But the taller you are, the further you have to fall. My wife says I don’t walk, I lumber, but that’s not really true. I walk just like everyone else. I didn’t want to walk on the roof because it’s likely I’ll just go through it, so I used a ladder and was leaning to get to the skylights.” That’s when Steve’s wife, Helen, had the scare of her life.

She was planting in the front yard when their youngest son, son #2, opened the front door and said “Daddy needs your help holding the ladder. Chop Chop. Quick like a bunny, no time for dawdling.” “Quick like a bunny” is not in son #2’s vocabulary so immediately Helen became alarmed. She came around the side of the house to find Steve hanging off the roof holding onto the skylight telling the couple’s oldest son, son #1, “DID SOMEONE GO GET MOMMY?!?!” Apparently he had spent several minutes trying to impress some urgency into the kids who were just sitting there looking out the window at him. A quick thinking Helen put the ladder back underneath him. After the ordeal, the couple held a press conference** where Steve remarked “It’s a good thing I program, it saved my life.” Helen added “His disturbingly strong fingers seemed to have saved him from a big fall. And people say computer geeks can’t do anything but program. Being 6′5″ and hanging from a skylight for several minutes is a pretty impressive feat even for a computer geek I’d say.”

 **Any similarity to actual press conferences may or may not be EXACTLY true. Some quotes may merely be a represention of thoughts attributed to speaker. ;)