A little, white lie.

So, some of you that already know me well may have noticed something. It says over there —> that I’m not very good with computers. As nice as it would be for this to be true, that is, “ignorance is bliss,” one of my primary responsibilities at work is the proper care and feeding of a 15-box Windows network, and an internal inventory management/point-of-sale Linux network that does most of the heavy lifting. I am by no means an expert, having a crude understanding of Linux, and not a very deep understanding of the Windows internals, beyond the registry.

As such, to do my job, I’ve developed a knack for troubleshooting all sorts of various software and hardware anomalies. Decent numbers of my friends have discovered this, so its not uncommon for people to come up to me, and usually say something like, “So Eric, on my computer at home, it… [insert some quirk or devastating error here.]” Lots of times its just a heavily laden spyware infection, other times something much more difficult to diagnose, especially from a generalized description of the problem.

So I try and console these lost and weary souls as best I can, suggesting some steps they might take. If the problem is serious enough and/or they are desperate enough, they attempt to bring me to the computer or bring the computer to me.

I’m going to let you in on a little secret. I’m really a superhero. As such, I have superpowers and superweaknesses. Why do I completely interrupt a perfectly good story to tell you this? Because one of my superpowers is what’s called “The Magic Touch&trade.”

The Magic Touch is a very powerful, uncontrollable superpower. Once I am set in front of a computer as described in the situation above, and the owner of said computer attempts to reproduce the error, it will not surface in my presence. If I attempt to do the exact same steps the owner does, the computer works flawlessly, and as expected for me.

Let’s review some recent cases of this:

Pamela Simpson: Pam owns a Mac. An iBook G3 to be exact, running OSX. Eric knows nothing about Macs, but for whatever reason the iBook was refusing to let her post to her blog. So we load up her blog, and I attempt to make a new post. The Magic Touch effect occurs, it works fine.

Work, last week: One of the users on the network complains that one of the main sites used in the store will not load on one of the front computers. I walk up there, open a browser window. MTe occurs, the site works fine for me.

Work again, 3 weeks ago: One of the users, angrily tells me she can’t print out an invoice on one of the dot matrix printers. Walk up there, jiggle the wire to the back of it. Send a print job to it, prints perfectly. She is angrier now, because she knew to at least check the wire connection, and tried jiggling it too. Another victim of the Magic Touch effect.

So enough about the Magic Touch effect. My other superpower and my superweakness can wait for another time.