thechangelab.com

Accidents

“An accident is something going wrong unexpectedly.”
from Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accident

These things happen to us at one point or another. Maybe you used that rm command without thinking. Or it was something that, in retrospect, was just plain STUPID.

At thechangelab, such matters verge on the quaint to the catastrophic. There are recollections of beads of sweat, unending curses and heart palpitations looming on some kind of a cardiac arrest. WHAT WENT WRONG?

Sometimes serendipity tells us why. Sometimes staying away for a while and coming back with a fresh set of eyes — and brain — can clarify things. What follows are just a few examples.

Case 1: not in a lab but at work. It was well after the store had closed, and my friend was working away on a WordPerfect document in DOS. Suddenly the machine froze. This was bad news. Panic. And then PANIC. It was a production system that kept the inventory, accounting, everything… A virgin to any kind of computer “problem”. He quickly made a call to a friend who had some expertise in such matters. She calmly went through a few routine steps until finally suggesting a cold boot. In some ways, her suggestion brought him across the chasm of how he saw computers. On the one side they were appliances, like your fridge or stove. On the other, a vague understanding of the complexities of hardware/software interaction and of course, bugs… In the end, the cold boot worked. He didn’t lose his job. He had a new respect for people who “knew” about computers.

Case 2: REALLY STUPID in retrospect… Back when Windows 95 was the thing. His parents had just bought a PC for the family. The older AT model had finally kicked the bucket. Well, one day, his cousin’s friend gave him a copy of Win 3.11 not knowing that he already had Win95. You may guess what happened next. A few weeks later he decided that the time had come to install it. After the install, he was greeted with a wonderful DOS prompt. No GUI. No icons. No wallpaper. No Microsoft Bob. A lonely prompt which prompted his panic. Now, it gets even more ridiculous. Not knowing a thing about patents, copyright nor IP rights, he calls Microsoft Support. He explained the situation. The woman then calmly told him that this copy was a bad thing and that she really couldn’t do anything for him. Fortunately, she didn’t inquire further into how he had come to obtain his copy of Win3.11. Next step, as in Case 1, he called a friend, who had to call someone else. After waiting some time, the call back came. He typed in some commands, and rebooted back into the wonderful world of Bob.

Case 3: it helps to stop trying to fix something before it breaks. One late night I was trying to figure out a problem with my PC not booting. It was acting as if it wasn’t plugged in half the time. Opening it up. Going over the manual. Nothing helped. It was getting frustrating. It was already past two in the morning. After closing the case for the umpteenth time and turning it on, I heard a loud pop and the smell of smoke. OH MY DATA. I took a look in the back and inside, nothing SEEMED fried. Then I noticed the power cable. It seemed a little odd at the base of the plug — not from being fried. It looked a little LOOSE. So, I used a different power cable. Everything booted okay. Next morning’s shopping trip consisted of getting a new power supply. The point here is that, I had disregarded troubleshooting rule no. 1 Start with the simple problems before progressing to the more complex ones. Not an OS issue. Not a BIOS issue. Not a mobo issue. It was the power cable. Yeah, and don’t forget to do a backup before doing something that might even remotely mess things up.

– toshiya