Obviously, instantaneous solutions are the best solutions.
But mysterious, magical solutions are annoying: you can’t learn from them. You might even be left doubting your own skills.
I’m writing this in order to restore your faith. And to tell you that I absolutely believe you when you exclaim that the problem really was just here a second ago.
What really happened:
① You paid attention
When someone tells me they have a problem, I assume that their problem is real, and that, together, we can always figure it out. I know this because I have a very high success rate of solving technology problems.
…And when someone like that is standing next to you, watching over your shoulder, you tend to think more carefully about what you’re doing. Often, this is enough to solve the problem.
② Computers are chaos
Software systems are…not mechanical machines. At any given moment there are literally billions of things happening inside them at once, each thing caused by inputs from dozens or thousands of different people in the present moment, influencing processes coded anywhere from an hour to thirty years ago, all interacting with each other.
That weird random problem you just had with something that always worked fine in the past — you just caught the system at a bad time. The delay between your first (bad) experience, and the second (mysteriously fine) experience is often enough for things to sort themselves out.
I can’t stress enough how normal and fine this is. You had a problem; I was available to help; you availed yourself of my help; it worked (one way or another), and we had a little chuckle and got back to our lives.
I’m a nerd, so my brain is (for funsies) constantly interrogating its own ideas of what might be happening inside the computer. You are, thankfully, not a nerd: you have a real job, and the computer is just your tool. You think about software systems the way I think about my car.
Together, we made (and make) a great team.
To sum up:
- You’re not crazy. I believe you.
- I absolutely am a magician. But the trick is a simple one.
- I’m happy to help.