hello sir, alt click in edit mode is not selecting a portion of the mesh on the little monster guy

Most likely you have this option enabled?

That replaces the ALT key in favor of navigating in the viewport. If you have it enabled, try turning it off. 

Ok, the mystery deepens. You say you "try to alt click a section of the arm while in wire frame". Do you actually mean wire frame? Or are you referring to Edit Mode? If not then you have to be in edit mode.

A couple other things come to my mind, are you in face select mode? Try being one face select when when edit mode to select the row of faces. Also maybe you mean you're trying to select more than one row, in which case after you select on row with ALT, to dd another you have to press both ALT and SHIFT.

And lastly, maybe the selection is not going in the direction you want and that has to do with the location of your mouse pointer. Depending on which corner of the face you have your mouse on, it will select the row of faces either vertically or horizontally.

Another thing that can be occurring is you have the Overlays turned off. Be sure you have those on:

And it is also possible that you changed the Keymap (for instance to Industry Compatibel), or that your OS (I know some Linux distros do that) is using ALT  for something else and is overriding Blender's ALT behavior.