Thursday, November 13, 2008

Ghosts in the machine? No, it's just me...

Why is it that when we see something strange happening on our computer screen, such as the mouse moving all by itself, we panic and attempt to take drastic measures to stop this?

 

I don’t know how many times I am working away on a client computer remotely when all of a sudden I lose control of the mouse, quickly recognizing that a user has come to use the computer,  I make attempts to contact them via chat or  attempt to disable the mouse from the user before they pull the plug!  Instead of taking a moment to see what that mouse pointer is doing, you would probably  notice that it is not doing harmful  things and in fact appears to be fixing itself and that is the entire point I attempt to make with all of my clients as I try to perform the various updates and cleaning/maintenance when the computer is not busy.  The real puzzling thing for me is when this panic attack happens only after I was the one that received the distress call with regards to computer problems in the first place, prompting me to connect and diagnose/repair the problem.  Fortunately in most cases when this panic attack happens and the system gets rebooted, I am not in the middle of a major firmware upgrade or something but I must say I can only laugh about it when it happens. After all the only other thing I can do is get upset and irritated, when communication is definitely the key here.  When the initial connection was made to repair the problem, this brief departure from the repair due to the system rebooting usually ends up a big learning experience for the end user and isn’t it good to learn something new every day?