Yesterday’s Boston Globe had a cover story about a freelance computer repairman who is rapidly gaining fame – and presumably fortune – for his skills at repairing non-warrantied damage to iPhones. What primarily caught my attention other than the fact that this guy’s own iPhone is going to crash merely from the number of calls he’s going to be receiving as a result of this story was what he said the two major forms of damage done to iPhones are. One is that they get dropped into toilets; the other is cracked screens.
I’ve never done the former, but when I read the story, I remembered that like almost half of the subject’s clients, I too have cracked the screen on my iPhone.
The price for replacing an iPhone screen was listed in the story as $100, which is just about what I guessed it would cost. Except that I’d all but forgotten my screen was cracked. It happened in late November, and although I briefly contemplated having it repaired at the time, I realized yesterday that the whole idea of fixing it, and in fact the whole idea that I’d broken it, had all but disappeared from my radar in the nearly three months since.
The damage isn’t particularly inconveniencing. It’s a cobweb break that starts in the upper lefthand corner of the screen with a concentrated cluster of cracks; one runs horizontally across the upper part of the screen and one extends about halfway down the left edge, but none of it interferes significantly with visibility of the screen.
Ultimately, though, I don’t really think it’s either the thought of spending $100 or the fact that the cracks aren’t much of an inconvenience that keeps me from seeking out a repair. I think it may be that on some level, the fact that I broke the screen just two weeks after getting the phone serves as a reminder of something important to me: a reminder not to try to juggle too much at once: a reminder to pay attention and be attentive to whatever is in my hands, literally or figuratively.
On the rare occasions that someone sees my cracked screen and asks what happened, I usually hasten to explain that it wasn’t entirely the result of my own carelessness. I was a new iPhone user and was out running with a podcast playing and the NikePlus pedometer app running at the same time. And then the phone rang. That in itself might have been a problem already – I’m not sure I could have taken the phone out of my armband while I was running and answered it without dropping it – but there were even more mitigating factors: there was a message on the screen saying I had to click “Pause Nike Plus” or “Ignore phone call” before I could continue with either one. I got distracted and bogged down in the details, and that was what caused me to drop my phone, and that’s how the screen broke.
But I don’t even completely blame myself. It was a Saturday morning and Tim had called me three different times in the course of my five-mile run. My kids seldom call me at all while I’m out running, but he wanted to make waffles for an overnight guest and needed quite a lot of guidance, as it turned out. So I tend to assign some of the blame to Tim and his waffle-making shortcomings.
Really, though, it’s a story of my own carelessness and, more importantly, my lack of ability to prioritize. The podcast; the pedometer; the phone call; the run: it was just too much for me to integrate seamlessly, and so something broke in the process. Shortly after that, I started using a wristband pedometer instead of the Nike Plus app, and I learned to answer the phone without taking it out of the armband if it does happen to ring while I’m running. These are arcane adjustments, but it was a way of addressing information overload that took care of a trivial but still relevant problem.
Maybe I will get the screen fixed eventually. But I don’t know that I’ll do it any time soon. In the bulls-eye shape of the cracks on my screen is a message: slow down, stay focused, stop going off in so many directions at once. It’s a good lesson for me to remember, and so having it reinforced every time I look at my screen seems, by and large, like a very good thing.
Showing posts with label IT. Show all posts
Showing posts with label IT. Show all posts
Friday, February 17, 2012
Tuesday, August 9, 2011
Computer karma
There was a time long ago when, in identical circumstances, I probably never would have learned that a distant acquaintance from high school who is also a writer but lives in New York caused irreversible computer damage yesterday morning by spilling coffee -- with milk -- on her keyboard.
But that long-ago time was before Facebook. And I didn't spend long on Facebook yesterday morning, honest. I spent three hours drafting a story about a food writer who just published a book about lobsters. A quick glimpse at Facebook before breaking for lunch was supposed to be my reward for my diligence.
I read the post with, frankly, little interest. "A little coffee on the keyboard? How bad can that be?" I shrugged to myself. "If keyboards couldn't withstand the occasional coffee spill, you wouldn't see them on every single table in Starbucks, right? I'm sure it will fix itself in no time."
Well, anyone who agrees with my that the goddess Fate has a sharp sense of irony can guess what happened next. I reached over to close my laptop and knocked over my water bottle. Right onto my keyboard.
But I grabbed it and righted it in no time. Two, maybe three tablespoons of water at the most had actually landed on the computer. "No problem," I reassured myself. "It's just lucky I drink nice clean water rather than milky sugary coffee, and it's lucky I have reasonably fast reflexes."
Wrong, of course. When I returned to my desk after lunch, my keyboard was utterly unresponsive. No vowels. No consonants. No space bar. No hard return. No numbers or symbols or shortcut keys. Nothing.
I put out the cry for help every way I knew: on Facebook, on Twitter, via email (to a friend who is an IT expert), by phone (to my husband, who I already knew probably wouldn't have time to help me with a computer fix until approximately halfway through Labor Day weekend).
Responses and advice poured in. I followed it all. I wiped the computer thoroughly with a chamois cloth. Then I borrowed a hair dryer from my mother-in-law and ran the hair dryer over the keyboard for about twenty minutes. Then I put the computer next to a pedestal fan and ran cool air over it for another ten minutes. Then I submerged my computer in a pan full of uncooked rice. (Apparently this is a great trick to deploy if your cell phone gets submerged in water. The dried rice absorbs the moisture. I've repeated the adjective "dried" preceding "rice" here in hopes of lowering the inevitable odds that someone will think I said to do this with cooked rice.)
Then I did another hair dryer treatment. After that, the whole body of the computer seemed overheated to me, so I wrapped it in a cool damp towel. It really would have made more sense to just send my laptop to a day spa and ask for "The Works," with hot stone massage and apricot facial most definitely included.
Now I'm letting my computer rest. We'll reevaluate later today. I have a different computer to work on in the meantime, and if I may indulge in a brief moment of self-righteousness, there is nothing on my regular laptop that I had neglected to back up -- yes, I learned that lesson the hard way and won't make that mistake again -- so I'm not worried about any particular files. I just want to be able to use the computer itself again sometime soon.
So in the end, lots of lessons learned. Don't snicker at your friends -- or your distant acquaintances -- when bad luck befalls them even in the form of a knocked-over coffee cup: you'll probably be next. Keep files backed up. Have plenty of uncooked (did I mention it has to be uncooked?) rice on hand. If you care about your computer, be prepared to indulge it with a full spa treatment at any time.
And, of course, no more full water bottles near the keyboard. The goddess of Fate might just catch me being dismissive of other people's computer problems once again, and this time the repair could be a lot more complicated than A Day at the Spa.
But that long-ago time was before Facebook. And I didn't spend long on Facebook yesterday morning, honest. I spent three hours drafting a story about a food writer who just published a book about lobsters. A quick glimpse at Facebook before breaking for lunch was supposed to be my reward for my diligence.
I read the post with, frankly, little interest. "A little coffee on the keyboard? How bad can that be?" I shrugged to myself. "If keyboards couldn't withstand the occasional coffee spill, you wouldn't see them on every single table in Starbucks, right? I'm sure it will fix itself in no time."
Well, anyone who agrees with my that the goddess Fate has a sharp sense of irony can guess what happened next. I reached over to close my laptop and knocked over my water bottle. Right onto my keyboard.
But I grabbed it and righted it in no time. Two, maybe three tablespoons of water at the most had actually landed on the computer. "No problem," I reassured myself. "It's just lucky I drink nice clean water rather than milky sugary coffee, and it's lucky I have reasonably fast reflexes."
Wrong, of course. When I returned to my desk after lunch, my keyboard was utterly unresponsive. No vowels. No consonants. No space bar. No hard return. No numbers or symbols or shortcut keys. Nothing.
I put out the cry for help every way I knew: on Facebook, on Twitter, via email (to a friend who is an IT expert), by phone (to my husband, who I already knew probably wouldn't have time to help me with a computer fix until approximately halfway through Labor Day weekend).
Responses and advice poured in. I followed it all. I wiped the computer thoroughly with a chamois cloth. Then I borrowed a hair dryer from my mother-in-law and ran the hair dryer over the keyboard for about twenty minutes. Then I put the computer next to a pedestal fan and ran cool air over it for another ten minutes. Then I submerged my computer in a pan full of uncooked rice. (Apparently this is a great trick to deploy if your cell phone gets submerged in water. The dried rice absorbs the moisture. I've repeated the adjective "dried" preceding "rice" here in hopes of lowering the inevitable odds that someone will think I said to do this with cooked rice.)
Then I did another hair dryer treatment. After that, the whole body of the computer seemed overheated to me, so I wrapped it in a cool damp towel. It really would have made more sense to just send my laptop to a day spa and ask for "The Works," with hot stone massage and apricot facial most definitely included.
Now I'm letting my computer rest. We'll reevaluate later today. I have a different computer to work on in the meantime, and if I may indulge in a brief moment of self-righteousness, there is nothing on my regular laptop that I had neglected to back up -- yes, I learned that lesson the hard way and won't make that mistake again -- so I'm not worried about any particular files. I just want to be able to use the computer itself again sometime soon.
So in the end, lots of lessons learned. Don't snicker at your friends -- or your distant acquaintances -- when bad luck befalls them even in the form of a knocked-over coffee cup: you'll probably be next. Keep files backed up. Have plenty of uncooked (did I mention it has to be uncooked?) rice on hand. If you care about your computer, be prepared to indulge it with a full spa treatment at any time.
And, of course, no more full water bottles near the keyboard. The goddess of Fate might just catch me being dismissive of other people's computer problems once again, and this time the repair could be a lot more complicated than A Day at the Spa.
Friday, March 25, 2011
When the Kindle screen goes blank
Yes, I admit I felt foolish this morning when my Kindle froze and I had no idea what to do.
I don’t mean I had no idea what to do from a technical standpoint. I was confident even in those first few seconds that a trick to unlocking a frozen Kindle would be easy to find on the customer support section of Amazon.com.
I just mean I’d forgotten what I used to do when my reading material didn’t shine off a screen.
It sounds ridiculous; I’ve been reading for more than 40 years, and only the past five months have been from a Kindle. But my Kindle is superloaded with reading material these days: my newspaper subscriptions, novels from the top of the New York Times bestseller lists, magazines, works of nonfiction, reference books, even articles and long emails from friends that I’ve pdf’d and sent into my Kindle directory.
So when the screen froze in the middle of the story about Mike Tyson from last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine while I was only a third of the way through my morning workout on my stationary bike, I momentarily froze along with it. Racking my brain as I continued to pedal, I couldn’t think of where in the house I had any reading material that I particularly wanted to dive into, mid-workout.
The fact that I was having something of an Andy Rooney moment did not escape me. While it’s true that during the many years I subscribed to the print version of the daily newspaper, there was the occasional morning that the paper didn’t appear on my doorstep because the deliverer was incapacitated or simply because the paper was under a snowbank, when that happened, I would just pick a book from the stack on my nightstand, or grab a magazine from the pile of mail on the kitchen table. The problem with the Kindle, I realized as I forged ahead with my biking regimen, was that it was the quintessential all-my-eggs-in-one-basket scenario. It wasn’t just that the morning paper had been suddenly rendered inaccessible; it was that every piece of reading material I’d selected in the past five months was now inoperable. Who ever heard of a technical malfunction keeping you from being able to read? I asked myself bemusedly, but also fully aware that the irreversible pull that mobile technology has over me had led directly to this quandary.
The only thing that gets me through my daily 45-minute stationary bike workout 7 days a week is that I so enjoy the chance to read while I’m doing it. As the minutes ticked by and my Kindle showed no sign of reactivating itself, I started to feel fatigued and bored long before the workout was scheduled to end. I tried to think of what books I had in the house that would keep my mind occupied for another 25 minutes or so. There was a copy of Camping for Dummies in the library bag, checked out earlier this month in hopes that it would motivate me to start planning a summer vacation. Somewhere in the kitchen there was a cooking magazine or two. I could read the Crate & Barrel catalog that arrived with yesterday’s mail. None of those sounded nearly as appealing as continuing with the Mike Tyson saga whose contents had apparently been sordid enough to crash my Kindle.
Just as I contemplated dashing into my 12-year-old’s room to grab a Guinness Book of World Records that might pass the time for five or six minutes, my Kindle flickered back to life, with today’s Boston Globe at the top of its directory. I grabbed for it and began scanning through the headlines, then toggled back to the Mike Tyson story, then hungrily checked to be sure all my other ebook files were still in place.
They were, and I don’t particularly blame my Kindle. The technology is still new; one bug in five months doesn’t seem so bad to me. I started reading again and made it through the rest of my workout. But I’d learned my lesson. From now on, I’ll definitely keep a back issue or two of the newspaper by my bike in case it happens again.
If only I could remember where to buy a newspaper.
I don’t mean I had no idea what to do from a technical standpoint. I was confident even in those first few seconds that a trick to unlocking a frozen Kindle would be easy to find on the customer support section of Amazon.com.
I just mean I’d forgotten what I used to do when my reading material didn’t shine off a screen.
It sounds ridiculous; I’ve been reading for more than 40 years, and only the past five months have been from a Kindle. But my Kindle is superloaded with reading material these days: my newspaper subscriptions, novels from the top of the New York Times bestseller lists, magazines, works of nonfiction, reference books, even articles and long emails from friends that I’ve pdf’d and sent into my Kindle directory.
So when the screen froze in the middle of the story about Mike Tyson from last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine while I was only a third of the way through my morning workout on my stationary bike, I momentarily froze along with it. Racking my brain as I continued to pedal, I couldn’t think of where in the house I had any reading material that I particularly wanted to dive into, mid-workout.
The fact that I was having something of an Andy Rooney moment did not escape me. While it’s true that during the many years I subscribed to the print version of the daily newspaper, there was the occasional morning that the paper didn’t appear on my doorstep because the deliverer was incapacitated or simply because the paper was under a snowbank, when that happened, I would just pick a book from the stack on my nightstand, or grab a magazine from the pile of mail on the kitchen table. The problem with the Kindle, I realized as I forged ahead with my biking regimen, was that it was the quintessential all-my-eggs-in-one-basket scenario. It wasn’t just that the morning paper had been suddenly rendered inaccessible; it was that every piece of reading material I’d selected in the past five months was now inoperable. Who ever heard of a technical malfunction keeping you from being able to read? I asked myself bemusedly, but also fully aware that the irreversible pull that mobile technology has over me had led directly to this quandary.
The only thing that gets me through my daily 45-minute stationary bike workout 7 days a week is that I so enjoy the chance to read while I’m doing it. As the minutes ticked by and my Kindle showed no sign of reactivating itself, I started to feel fatigued and bored long before the workout was scheduled to end. I tried to think of what books I had in the house that would keep my mind occupied for another 25 minutes or so. There was a copy of Camping for Dummies in the library bag, checked out earlier this month in hopes that it would motivate me to start planning a summer vacation. Somewhere in the kitchen there was a cooking magazine or two. I could read the Crate & Barrel catalog that arrived with yesterday’s mail. None of those sounded nearly as appealing as continuing with the Mike Tyson saga whose contents had apparently been sordid enough to crash my Kindle.
Just as I contemplated dashing into my 12-year-old’s room to grab a Guinness Book of World Records that might pass the time for five or six minutes, my Kindle flickered back to life, with today’s Boston Globe at the top of its directory. I grabbed for it and began scanning through the headlines, then toggled back to the Mike Tyson story, then hungrily checked to be sure all my other ebook files were still in place.
They were, and I don’t particularly blame my Kindle. The technology is still new; one bug in five months doesn’t seem so bad to me. I started reading again and made it through the rest of my workout. But I’d learned my lesson. From now on, I’ll definitely keep a back issue or two of the newspaper by my bike in case it happens again.
If only I could remember where to buy a newspaper.
Friday, September 17, 2010
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.
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.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)