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Don't look for complex solutions to
simple problems
Seemingly "complex" problems often
turn out to have infuriately simple solutions.
The average computer user today
has at the command of his fingertips (and - for some "early
adopters" - his voice) an incredibly powerful, and just as
incredibly complex, device. From grade school students to senior
citizens, they have at their desks, on their kitchen
countertops, and even in their bedrooms, power only dreamed of
by the systems managers who held the keys to the largest
mainframes owned (or more likely, leased) by the largest
corporations of the 1960's.
And so, quite naturally, when things go wrong there is a
tendency - or perhaps even a psychological need - to seek out a
solution worthy of the beast.
Well, folks, I am here to tell you that sometimes, just every
now and then - but more often than you might think - the problem
is not nearly so complex as it seems and the solution is as
simple as moving a book just one inch to the left.
It's all so obvious ... once you know the answer.
On three separate occasions in
an 18-month period, I was asked to look at a PC that was
spontaneously rebooting. No error messages, just a sudden drop
out to a black screen followed by a beep and then standard BIOS
startup messages. There was never any unusual software being
used - just typical "office" applications, if you catch my
drift, and the events did not seem to be related to any
particular application, nor tied to the usual suspects like
screensavers or going into/coming out of power-saving modes.
There had been no hardware or operating system upgrades or
changes within recent memory.
I admit, the first of these had me a bit stumped. The user
called perhaps four times over a one-month period to complain
that "it happened again." Each time I went to her office,
reviewed the situation with her, and made a few adjustments. I
turned off her screensaver, disabled hard disk sleep mode, ran a
memory exerciser to check for a faulty module, and so on. It was
not until the fifth call that I finally struck pay dirt.
As the user was explaining what she had been doing at the moment
her system rebooted itself, she shifted slightly in her chair
and boom! Finally, I was present for an actual event! No more
second-hand reporting; I saw with my own eyes exactly what she
had been doing when the event occurred. And, do you know what
made the strongest impression upon me? Not the application she
was running, not her mouse or keyboard actions. No...
...she had moved! And, in an instant, I knew that her system had
rebooted because it had momentarily lost power. Sure enough, an
exploration of the nether regions under her desk turned up lots
of dust bunnies, a lost pencil (probably there for a decade or
more...) and a power strip that was so sensitive that the merest
tap of her foot (I used the pencil to nudge it and then to lift
one edge and let it drop one-quarter inch to the floor) would
cause a brief power interruption.
Armed with this experience, when I got the next call about
spontaneous rebooting several months later, it only took two
visits to the user's desk to figure out what was going on - a
power cord that was not securely plugged into the rear of the
PC.
And the third time? Well, suffice to say that power strips,
cords, and UPS's, are now the first things I check when looking
at a PC that spontaneously reboots.
Sometimes it's not what is under the desk but what is on top of
it.
One of our accountants called to say that there was something
wrong with the spreadsheet he was working on. What he described
over the phone, multiple highlighted cells, was not making much
sense, so I took a walk to his office to see for myself.
What I saw when I arrived was indeed confusing. Wherever he
clicked in the spreadsheet, a new cell would become highlighted.
I couldn't imagine how he had accomplished this feat and, trying
it for myself, I soon had some twenty randomly positioned cells
highlighted.
Once I got over my initial confusion, my first guess was that he
must have somehow enabled one of the Windows "Accessibility
Options" even though he insisted that was not the case. I was
about to open the Control Panel applet to examine that
possibility when I saw what was really wrong.
Now, I should mention that this particular accountant has a
reputation for working with several large reports and
ledger-like books spread out all over his workspace. Only when I
had let go of his mouse and moved my hands to his keyboard did I
notice that the very corner of one of his books was lying,
almost imperceptibly, across the corner of his keyboard’s left
Control key. Under the circumstances, the mouse activity was
doing exactly as it should have, selecting multiple,
non-adjacent, cells.
As I said a few paragraphs earlier, moving the book one inch to
the left solved this initially perplexing problem.
On another occasion, the same accountant called and, once again,
reported strange mouse behavior in a spreadsheet. Curious, I
went immediately to his desk and watched as each click of the
mouse caused a new range of cells to be highlighted.
It only took a moment to see that, a ledger was holding his left
Shift key down.
I kid you not, people, this stuff is for real.
Update:
It's been many months since I wrote the above text but I just
had to tell you that some very unusual things can happen when
the ESCape key is unintentionally held down by desk clutter.
And, no, this time it wasn't in the accounting department. :)
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