He may be on to something

If you read the comments on yesterday's post, they raise some interesting points and conjectures.

I think we've all had experiences like the one described by kenju. I know I have, at least. You completely give up on some piece of equipment or component, buy a replacement, and then before you throw away the old one you try it one last time, and it works!

Taken one step further: if you then return the purchased replacement item, the original will again begin to malfunction. You just KNOW it's laughing at you! You grind your teeth and re-purchase the replacement. Then, like me with my router, you throw the old one in the trash even though it may once again be working fine, because now it's unreliable. Then you berate yourself for "wasting" a "perfectly good ______."

There's a fine line between Murphy's famous law, and the "C."

Then RobotJam weighed in (I didn't catch his weight, exactly. And even if I HAD caught it I'm not sure I could convert "stone" into pounds or kilograms. You know those Brits!) with his correlation between calling tech support and the "C."

It's a funny thing about tech support folks. All they ever tell me to do is to pull the power plug on various components, wait 30 seconds, plug it back in, and then reboot the computer. It doesn't matter if I tell them I've just done exactly that 10 times before I called them. They tell me to do it again in some new sequence. And often the problem then goes away, like Rob said.

I think they're really just resetting things on their end and telling me to power-down and then power-up devices just to brag later to their colleagues, like this:

"Hey, wait till I tell you about the doofus who called me last night. I got him to reboot his computer 6 dozen times before I turned his internet connection back on! I'll bet he would have kept on doing it all night if I'd had the patience to keep telling him to do it!"

Then they all laugh and drink some more coffee while other poor souls are sitting at home, waiting, listening to that awful music-on-hold. When the tech support folks get tired of laughing, the put their headsets back on, push the button, tell the caller that their name is something they just made up, and begin again telling him/her to reboot.

But Rob MAY be right. Those nerds and the "C" MAY be in cahoots!

I'll ask Murphy, next time I see him.