Geek, Heal Thyself: Treating Yourself Like a Client

When I run into a banal issue with my own technical device, it can be extremely irritating. The audacity of my own device! How dare it malfunction! Why doesn’t it “just work”? It seems especially bad since I fix these issues as my job. All my work days are filled with helping others to fix these very issues. How can they happen to me?

Today I started down this path when I had an issue printing. Printers and I have a special dysfunctional relationship. I don’t want to believe printing, on stuff made from trees, still exists, and I’m baffled as to how it functions at all, given the huge melange of protocols, drivers, disorderly manuals, installation software, and general crap that surrounds printing. I desperately want computer printing to die a sudden death. I pray that e-paper, e-books, personal devices, or something, soon takes over the universe of printing.

DIE PRINTER DIE!

So, today, a sense of dread settled in when my own Chrome browser reported, many times, "Print is unavailable because the page you were trying to print has crashed". No matter how I tried to print, this message would be the only result. Why did this work before and not now? I knew I didn’t make any printer changes, I so rarely print as it is. Why would Chrome not print?

WHY, MY PRECIOUS CHROME, WHY?

When I get to that special angry-red space, I try to treat myself like I would any other client. I remind Ken that, yes, technology should "just work", but sometimes things break. I settle in to solving the problem for Ken, with the same happy enthusiasm that I would deliver to any client. Often that’s enough to drive away the frustration.

In this case it worked. I dug in, and in spite of not finding a working solution online, I managed to fix Chrome so it would print again. Turns out something was wrong with my default printing, I changed my default printer to another printer, then changed it back. Doing that weird voodoo thing, which should never fix a problem, fixed my problem.

If there’s a lesson here, it is to treat yourself kindly and just as special as you would others. It's a lot less frustrating, and may even help you to focus and fix your issue more quickly.