My dad is a software engineer, so whenever he can't fix something, he proclaims it to be a hardware problem, and thus not his department. I'm a political scientist, not a computer scientist, but in this technological age, I've had to learn my fair share about computers. I've never had any formal training (except for the typing class I had to take in high school), but I've managed to pick it up quite well.
When my laptop died last year, my dad and one other computer engineer said that it was toast and that I would have to buy a new one. Since I was (and still am) on a student budget (seriously, grad students are even poorer than undergrads), I was determined to fix it. It turns out that my hard drive was scratched and all I had to do was replace it. No problem. I took care of it in under an hour. (Well, under an hour once I diagnosed the problem...it took me a lot longer than that to figure out what the problem was.)
Computer knowledge is a blessing and a liability. On the blessing side, I can set up and manage my wireless network without paying anyone else to do it. On the other hand, once people find out my hidden talent, they are forever asking me to fix their computers.
This is especially pronounced at work. I provide in-home care for disabled adults. My two clients share an apartment, and I come in on the weekend to provide care. There are other staff members who come in during the week. There is an internet connection available for staff use. Somehow, I ended up as the de-facto network administrator.
Sometime during the week, some of the staff members had moved the telephones in the apartment. When I arrived this evening, the person I was relieving said that for some unknown reason, the computer was broken, and she asked me to take a look at it. I did, and the computer was fine. However, the internet connection was down. I couldn't find any reason why it should have been down. The computer had a good connection to the router, and the router had a good connection to the modem. I checked all plugs, and then on a whim, I walked out to the kitchen. Sure enough, the spare phone had been plugged into the wall without a DSL filter. I unplugged the spare phone, and, voila! Internet access.
Lesson of the day: When in doubt, it's a hardware problem.
1 comment:
Yeah...I can't count the number of times I've been sure that something was wrong with my computer and it was something like that plug issue. Particularly during the semester my roommate took my one-time permission to use my computer as unlimited access to my computer. She was always and forever doing something bizarre to that computer.
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