Sometimes it’s the little things – the small issues that aren’t actually what we do (ie, not data-related, or processes, or whatever) – that drive you the most crazy. The things that make you roll your eyes and think “Who would ever work in tech?”, like trying to make a printer work, or whatever.
Except we do!
I think I’m still mostly able to solve these things better than most (although nowadays I’m more likely to let my kids do that), but still there are things that frustrate me and make me roll my eyes.
I don’t think this is quite what Deepthi Goguri is asking about in her T-SQL Tuesday topic for this month, but she does ask about “technological problems”, and I think this kind of thing is fair enough.
Regular readers of my blog will have read about my frustrations at getting things working on a Snapdragon processor. I didn’t manage to solve that one, but let me tell you about something which I did solve, that just seems like a stupid little thing.
I lost the ability to sign in to laptop I was given.
I’d been sent a laptop to work for a client. I’d plugged it in at home, and everything was fine, but then I working elsewhere and needed to use it, and I couldn’t log in. It kept telling me that my password was wrong, and yet I was making sure to type it very carefully. The “show the password” thing was disabled, so I couldn’t check it that way.
I wasn’t anywhere near their network, which would’ve let me set the password in M365, so that wasn’t going to work. I’ve done that before when I’ve had trouble with a password. One time I had changed my password within M365 after getting an alert that the password was going to expire, and found myself locked out of a laptop I was using – fixed by connecting to their WiFi and then logging in with the new password. But this wasn’t an option for this one.
And then I saw the answer.
One of the keys wasn’t working. I’d been typing the word, and was sure it was correct, but the number of dots on the screen was short by one. When I typed it slowly watching the screen (instead of the keyboard), I saw that one of the letters didn’t appear. Ok, it was a number, but still. I picked up a portable bluetooth keyboard, paired it to the laptop, and logged in first time. Now that keyboard lives permanently in my bag, which also means I have an option for using a keyboard for my phone or whatever else I might want one for.
Being this is a really cheap and light keyboard – it’s not my favourite portable keyboard, which is a Microsoft one that has a touchpad on it. That one uses a USB dongle which seems to have disappeared, and it has now been retired to a box of stuff that will be thrown out when I’m ready for the dongle to turn up again.
Hooray for the things that keep us grounded. For those things that help remind us that technology can still drive us up the wall, even though the rest of the world thinks we’re experts in every kind of tech.
@robfarley.com@bluesky (previously @rob_farley@twitter)
