Help desk, know thyself

As I was about to shut down my laptop late Wednesday night, I saw a message on the screen saying that an automatic system update was about to begin. Fine, I thought. Those tend to be advantageous. Let it begin.

Knowing that system changes had happened while I slept was the only explanation I could think of yesterday morning when I couldn’t get past start-up on my computer. It asked for my logon and then said “User profile failed to load.” And there seemed to be no way to get past that screen.

Normally, this kind of major IT problem would send me straight to my husband, pleading for his help while apologizing profusely for taking up his time. But Rick was out of town on a business trip. My brother-in-law, who can solve almost any IT problem, is in Germany. And I didn’t feel comfortable prevailing on my few other personal contacts with IT expertise.

So instead I found the Windows 7 help forum site and started a new thread describing the error message I was getting. Within minutes, someone wrote back to send me a link. The link took me to a very long, multi-step explanation of how to circumvent the problem I was having.

“I can’t possibly do that whole process,” I thought as I read through it. “Start up in Safe mode? Reboot in Administrator mode? Open system files to rename the user profile? I don’t know how to do any of this. I don’t know how to do anything when it comes to the workings of this computer other than turn it on. I’ll keep this link with its long and complex explanation of what to do, and I can show it to Rick once he’s home, and maybe if I’m really lucky he’ll have time to try the fix this weekend.”

Which meant, however, that the problem wouldn’t be solved for several days, and in that time I wouldn’t have use of my computer or any of the files on it.

And I suppose it goes without saying that I spent about six hours the day before editing my own manuscript and hadn’t backed up that file. Six hours of work isn’t a horrible amount to lose – it’s not like six months, which was more like the time frame of writing the manuscript – but as any writer knows, any time you draft something and then lose it, you’re convinced that subsequent drafts are never quite as good as that first one. (By the same token, first drafts themselves are never quite as good as the one you wrote in your head while showering or running.) Even if I redid the six hours of work, I’d always suspect the version that was lost was better.

So I looked again at the long complicated set of directions. “Start in Safe mode?” I read. “I have no idea how to do that.”

Except...wait a second. Something about that sounded vaguely familiar. Every now and then my computer freezes and I push the on switch to reboot. And then…isn’t there usually something on the screen about starting in Safe mode?

I tried it. It worked. I found the Safe mode. I used it. I went on to Step 2, which directed me into the system files. “I don’t know how to work in system files!” I moaned to myself. “That’s way too complicated!”

Except that the wording in that step aligned perfectly with what I saw on my screen in front of me. So I tried it. And that brought me to a screen shot indicating a folder I needed to open. A folder labeled just like the one on my screen.

It turned out the directions weren’t that hard to follow. I went through all twenty steps, and when I was done, my computer was working again.

The triumph I felt was inexpressible. “I’m terrible with computers,” I had told myself earlier. “I’ll never be able to fix this without Rick’s help. If I try, I’ll cause a much bigger problem.”

But then I located the instructions, and followed the instructions, and fixed the problem. Turns out I had the aptitude after all.

I was smug with joy, but it was a sobering reminder not to be so quick to tell myself what I can and can’t do; what kind of person (not the IT kind) I am or am not.

True, being able to follow directions in a help forum doesn’t exactly qualify me for a job at Microsoft’s support center. But it proves that sometimes the first step to solving a problem is believing you can solve it. I believed. I solved. It’s trivial, but I felt so proud of myself: not for fixing a computer bug but for taking the time to see if I could. My reward? The joy of seeing that I had more abilities than I thought, even if those abilities consist primarily of reading directions.

Later in the afternoon I backed up all the files I’d been working on just in case something like this happens again. Well, not in case it happens again. When it does. Because it will. And next time I might not find a fix. But at the very least, I’ll know enough to look for one.