In the 21st century battle between us mere mortals and machines, you can almost guarantee that at some point these slaves to humanity, built to supposedly make all of our lives so much easier, will for reasons best known not even to themselves sometimes, misbehave, crash, or worse, die.
It will swear blind that the printer, it’s trusty neighbour sat right next to it for all to plainly see, doesn’t, couldn’t possibly or has never existed… in some extremes it will insist the art of printing hasn’t even been invented yet, except for 30 minutes ago when you ran that document off for your boss with all the mistakes still in.
It will never easily explain why, shrouding the mystery with cryptic ‘Error Type 2204’ messages (how on earth you did you make 2,203 other errors to get to that?). Feeling helpless and unable to fix this mess that your formerly trusty companion has dumped on you, rest assured at least one or both of the following will now happen:
- If you try to fix it yourself, it won’t work.
- If you ask for help from someone, they’ll fix it straight away (even if they do exactly what you did ten times over without success before they arrived).
Why do machines do this? Simple really… computers love to make a mockery out of all of us, even the techies! The golden rule is that if your computer can screw up it will, whether you want it to or not.
How can you fix it? Nine times out of ten restarting your computer will vanquish most gremlins. It sounds simple, but if it’s good enough for the crew of the starship Enterprise (you’d be amazed how many plotlines rested on switching it on and off again), it’s good enough for me too.
If you’ve still got a problem, it’s probably more serious than your computer having a tiff, so then it’s a good idea to pass the headache on to people in my line of work, that’s what we’re here for after all!