I’ve got two situations with technology that I want to talk about today. The first one is that some tech problems have nothing to do with you, or anything you’ve done – sometimes the gremlins in the system just decide to run amok. And the second one is pretty much the opposite of the first, involving something called PEBCAK (read on and I’ll explain)…
On Friday morning, I was rudely awoken at 4 in the morning by an ear-splitting bleeping sound. After stumbling about in the dark for a bit, I discovered that the source of the noise was my work laptop, doing its best impression of a reversing lorry and showing me a message on the screen that there was something very wrong with my hard drive.
I took a quick picture of the error message on my phone to show whoever would need to fix it (always a good idea, where possible), and then I forced the laptop to switch off by holding down the Power button for about ten seconds. I unplugged it from the charger for good measure, and made a mental note to apologise to my next door neighbour for the disturbance at a more reasonable hour.
The second thing happened while I was using one of the spare work laptops while mine was getting a replacement hard drive. For some reason, the spare laptop kept locking the screen and asking me to log in again at random times, sometimes mere seconds after I’d just logged in.
It was very odd, and more than a little frustrating, until I realised that every time I went to do something on the laptop, I was resting my wrist over one of the laptop’s sensors. You might have wondered how a laptop knows to turn the screen off when you close the lid – well on this particular model, it uses sensors to register when the lid is closed, which I’d been confusing every time I went to type something or use the trackpad.
So this particular problem was a distinct case of PEBCAK, which is where the Problem Exists Between Chair And Keyboard. Or in other words, I was the problem – so while sometimes it’s the gremlins, and we’ve done nothing wrong… but sometimes it is us. Whoops!