I told you I might drop off the air because of pure cluelessness. When said affliction showed up, it turned out to be so stupid and so simple I don't know whether to be mad at myself or the fools who designed this box.
After W loaded the software on this new pooter, he warned me about an unobtrusive little switch on one of the front corners of the box. "My advice," he said, "is never flip this switch."
You have to look closely to even see it; it's small and black-on-black. If you really squint, you can see that one side is marked "on" and the other side "off". It also happens to be located riiiight where a person might grip the box while taking it on or off the docking port. What it does, for reasons surpassing my poor understanding, is completely disable any possibility of network connection.
I, of course, completely forgot about the senseless little switch until I went crying to W for aid this morning.
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Scott Adams (Dilbert) loves to make the point that we all do stupid things...and I know that I have long lost track of how many stories I have in which I zing through the day performing rocket-science heroics and in the middle of it all I manage something so colossally stupid that I really wonder how I manage to walk without falling.
"C'mon, we've gotta go now!"
"I...I can't. They've...tied my shoelaces together."
"...bastards."
(From Hot Shots! Part Deux)
And, as a longtime enterprise software developer, I have long personally suspected that the transposition of diametrically opposed buttons is a deliberate prank by other developers. (With some software, the "free trial" versions will spontaneously transpose such buttons, and it certainly seems engineered to get you to click the "buy now" button if you're not paying attention.)
I'll let you in on a little secret Joel: Even with us IT professionals, 99% of the time it's something stupid... Why do you think we have technobabble?
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