Musings at Altitude

I had a crisis yesterday – my track ball on my blackberry decided not to actually track down the screen.  It would go up.  It would go right and left.  But it wouldn’t lead the cursor down the screen.  For those of you as dependent on technology as I am, you understand the incredible crisis I went through.

The first thing I thought was to pull the battery and reboot the blackberry just in case it was a flaky software issue rather than mechanical failure.  My wife was telling me “just shut it off”, but I immediately went to the battery pull technique which required me to disassemble my blackberry in the middle of PF Chang’s.  There’s nothing like proving you’re a geek in the middle of a big restaurant like PF Chang’s during the high traffic lunch crowd.  With my wife shaking her head, I pulled the battery, put it back in, and waited anxiously as the hour glass kept flipping before the menu came back up.  It finally did after what seemed like an eternity, and lo and behold it didn’t change a thing…the track ball still didn’t track down.   Since my first choice of crisis response options didn’t work, I immediately went to option 2 – banging the blackberry on the table to see if I could somehow dislodge whatever was preventing the track ball from tracking down.  After a couple of bangs and further track ball rolling, that too did nothing to change the downward tracking deficiency in the track ball.  With option 1 and option 2 now tried with no success, we started talking about finishing lunch quickly and running to the AT&T store to see if they could do emergency surgery on the track ball.  Before we committed to such a dramatic deviation from plan (I couldn’t go to the airport without a working blackberry), I decided to take a physically ruthless approach to the track ball and to the blackberry overall, forcing the track ball into the blackberry and aggressively tracking back and forth and up and down to try and break loose any physical particle that may have been preventing the track ball from tracking properly.  Since lunch was so slow to arrive, I had plenty of time to attack the blackberry.  Though some may be appalled at such an approach, I learned very early in my military career that if a piece of technology I was expecting to work was for any reason not working, often times beating on it for any lengthy period of time for some reason encouraged it to work!  Lo and behold, that same approach got it to work this time too!

Now before I get turned over to the “don’t beat on technology” police, I must admit that if pulling the battery or a couple of quick bangs on the table don’t work, I’m at a loss as to what else to do to fix broken technology.  Unfortunately for the lonely repair folks sitting at the cell phone store desperately waiting for folks like me to tear things apart, beating on the technology works probably 80-90% of the time…that’s a fact!  It works so much, I ought to bang first and pull the battery second.  I honestly don’t understand why I pull the battery first…it never seems to work…but brutalizing it almost always seems to work.  I fully realize that I’m probably in some way greatly decreasing the possible lifespan of my blackberry, but I’m having a hard time caring about that right now because it works again…because of the aggressive troubleshooting…and without me having to go back into the AT&T store and talk them through what doesn’t work and wait for them to try a couple of things and then replace the device because they too couldn’t get it to work by pulling the battery or scrolling the track ball. 

Yep…I’m a happy man today since my blackberry still works.