Jonathan Dodd‘s latest column. Guest opinion articles do not necessarily reflect the views of the publication. Ed
Sadly my current employers aren’t modern enough to grasp the concept of working-from-home. At least, not for me. That’s why I go back and forth a lot to work. I don’t like carrying a lot of hardware around, so I bought myself a small laptop, which is the Acer of my eye. I’m not boasting when I say it’s 10.1 inches, it hardly weighs anything, and it’s very portable.
I had a bit of a shock this week, because my lovely laptop stopped working. It did one of those things that computers do sometimes, and went blank, like the face of a teenager who has stopped listening to you. The screen went a dark shade of blue and I couldn’t get it to respond to any stimuli. Weirdly, when I restarted it (it hadn’t closed down completely), everything started up again, and it welcomed me as usual while the little dots went round in a circle, then it just went blank again.
Maybe it had just needed a rest
The mouse was still able to point its pointer futilely at any part of the screen, without reaction. And I was able to key good old Ctrl-Alt-Del and see the task Manager screen. But that is the absolute limit of my technical expertise and understanding. I could see that some things were ticking over, but it didn’t tell me anything that I could interpret.
I took it home with a heavy heart, and brought it back to work, ditto. I plugged it in and switched it on in the hope that somehow it had fixed itself overnight. Maybe it had just needed a rest. Perhaps it was uploading a particularly large upgrade to the operating system. I could even have just dreamed it all. I watched the little dots go round and round, and then I watched the screen go dark blue, and my heart sank.
Do it now. No excuses
I wasn’t worried about my data, which is obviously the most important thing. I do housekeep regularly, and I have backups on external hard drives as well as the Cloud. None of it is perfectly synchronised, but I could retrieve everything eventually. If any of you out there don’t housekeep and backup, do it now. No excuses.
I found that I was most bothered by the inconvenience, having to break my normal chaotic routine for something out of my control. And I missed the friendly little screen peering at me from under the much larger monitor on my desk. I realised that I was going to have to find someone who knew more than me and take it to them to fix.
Ignorance is my greatest asset
Being a nincompoop technically (I’m a tester – ignorance is my greatest asset), I know that an expert can be someone who only knows one more thing than you about something, but I was going to have to admit my ignorance to a stranger and trust that they would do a good job and save my precious laptop. That meant a lot of phone calls and maybe a day or two without it.
I was making a list of phone numbers from yellow pages when I decided I just had to have another go, so I attacked the problem of the moribund machine with true tester’s instincts. Basically, this involved pressing lots of keys at random. Imagine my surprise when the screen suddenly came to life and everything returned to normal.
Until the next crisis
Now this is where I reveal the real talent of a tester. It’s all very well to go mad and break things, but you’ve also got to be able to go back and remember exactly how you broke them. In this case I was able to retrace my steps and find out what combination of keys I pressed to make my laptop wake up. In common with most laptops, it goes to sleep when you shut the lid, but it turns out that my laptop has a key combination that makes it go to sleep without closing the lid, and I accidentally hit that combination without realising.
So all’s well that ends well. Until the next crisis, which will be equally different and unexpected and frustrating. I sometimes wish there was a way to insulate ourselves from events like this, which intrude on our lives in annoying ways, but I don’t think that’s possible. And anyway, it was my last clunky old laptop breaking that caused me to buy my lovely new one, and no doubt there’ll be an even lovelier one waiting to be bought when this one actually breaks, rather than pretending to break, of course.
It might not be trivial
Our Island car is acting up as well. Two little yellow warning lights come on intermittently on the dashboard. Taking it to the garage is going to involve buses and getting wet and cold and being late for things and paying out unexpected money, but it’s got to be done, because it might not be trivial.
I do find it interesting that we get so attached to things working, and then so fed up and angry when they don’t. Somehow I know that it would be very bad for us if everything worked perfectly all the time.
That would be too comfortable. And actually very dull.
If you have been, thank you for reading this.
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