Our Fun in Learning

April Fools' Day is one of a technician's favorite holidays. In an old ISP I used to work at, we used to call it "Troubleshooting Day", because you were guaranteed to come into work and sit down at a brand new, innovative and very deliberate computer problem designed to make you pull your hair for your entire shift. Some of the newer techs found it to be very childish and aggrivating at first, but they didn't understand the reason for the season - dealing with these little pranks inevitably made them better techs by teaching them something new about the way their system worked.

One year, for example, the gang thought it would be fun to take a screenshot of my desktop, move all of my icons off the screen, and hide the taskbar with the start button from the bottom. The practical result of this prank was that every time I tried to click on a program on my desktop, nothing would happen, because I was really clicking on a /picture/ of the symbol that would normally open my program instead of clicking on the symbol itself. Embarrassingly, it took me almost an hour to realize their deception and bring things back to the way they should be, but along the way, I learned the keyboard shortcuts associated with using the desktop (for example, press your pretty-looking Windows key on the bottom left corner of the keyboard, just to the right of your Ctrl button. You'll discover that your Start Menu pops up - whether you've hidden it from view or not), and I learned how to do a search for recently modified files to find my missing program links, and most importantly I learned the concept that sometimes things can seem to be malfunctioning but really be working perfectly.

Yesterday, that knowledge once again saved me a lot of time and energy, as I was called in to help a customer who believed that she had deleted all of her liquor from her Aldelo menus. I was prepared to spend a gruelling three hours ripping apart a backup of her database in order to recover it all without losing any of her sales information, but instead, thanks to that April Fools' Day so many years ago, I first checked to make sure that the database was actually a smaller size. When I discovered that it wasn't, I looked inside the Menu Groups and viola, there it all was, hidden from view because the manager's finger slipped and checked the box that told the program that those items were being discontinued. I reactivated them and twenty seconds later, everything was right as rain again.

Struggles always teach lessons, be they in life, or on the desktop.