Basic Troubleshooting For All Things

Surprise, surprise guys: Unfortunately, we are still in age of – did you try restarting? Sometimes a fix is on the application level and sometimes on the hardware level. For example - if a program like Zoom isn’t recognizing a webcam that you used 10 minutes ago, and you’ve restarted the app to no avail, try to restart your computer! Premiere Pro and Vectorworks are big offenders of this, too. It’s amazing how often it fixes things. Think about every process and configuration as if it produced a cache. When the cache gets full, sometimes you need to reboot to empty it. In the early 2010s, it felt like we were floating bally getting beyond this, but now we’re back again. I have to restart my iPhone daily because of dumb little UX bugs.

This is called, colloquially, Voodoo shit. I’m looking for a new term, as this is probably offensive, but this tends to be more accessible than the phrase Deus Ex Machina. When the robots finally take over, call tech support and they’ll ask you: are there steps you can take to reproduce the issue? Also, try asking chatGPT to write some very specific Excel formulas for you and react in fear with its insistence on solutions that fundamentally do not work. We are s-c-r-e-w-e-d.