I’ll preface this by saying that if someone works in a certain industry, I do not expect them to know absolutely everything there is to know, but some basic grasp of it would be nice.

I have been having a few problems with my laptop computer of late, specifically with the power supply and battery. The battery charges while the computer is connected to mains supply, able to sustain 2 hours of worktime once disconnected from the wall socket. Five minutes before the battery is fully drained of power, a small alert window pops up, telling me that I should connect to another power supply or stop working, to avoid any data loss.

Fair enough. That’s a handy thing to know, because it saves going back to the small battery icon in the bottom right hand corner and clicking it to find out how much time remains. I also get five minutes to quickly finish off my train of thought, close the program, and shut down the computer without hassles.

However, in the last few weeks, the time between the pop-up alert telling me there are five minutes left, and the automatic shutting down of the computer when it runs out of power has no longer been five minutes. It’s actually only been one half of one second, which is definitely not useful at all. On top of this, the “you have five minutes left” warning is appearing at random intervals, such as when I have 25 or 30 minutes left, followed half a second later by the total shutdown of the computer through lack of power.

This makes the laptop not so reliable for work, as you might imagine, since it might shut down at any time, too quickly for me to save my work in that half second. It was still under warranty, so I took it in to the Toshiba authorised service centre in Richmond.

One of the people behind the counter, a pleasant 20yo lady, came over to speak to me as I approached. I told her I was bringing the computer in to be serviced under warranty, and showed the receipt to prove it was within the correct time period for warranty work. She looked a little panicked, as though she’d not seen a computer before, but got a form for writing down the details and asked me what the problem was with the computer.

I explained about the two-hour battery in the laptop, and that at the five minute mark, it was supposed to give a warning to save the work. She nodded in understanding. I then went on to say how the pop-up warning was appearing at random, at the wrong times, when there was sometimes over an hour of battery time left, then the computer would close down. She again nodded in an understanding fashion. On top of this, I explained, there was not actually five minutes to react to this problem, because the time warning and the shutdown sequence happened within half a second of another, meaning by the time I saw the “five minutes left” warning, it was already turning off.

She thought about this for a couple of seconds, then replied.

SPOTD: ”I’ll put down there is an error message appearing.”

Me: “But it is not really an error message.  It’s the appropriate warning for imminent shutdown, but at the wrong time.”

SPOTD: “Hmm… So it is not an error message?”

Me: “No. It’s shutting down at random, and the time between the message and the shutdown is the usual one that should appear when it has five minutes left. However, even if it does happen at the right time, when there are five minutes left, it still closes down in one half of one second.”

SPOTD (brightly): “Oh, okay.  Are there any programs that this happens in more than others?”

Me: “Well, I’m using either Word or Excel, but it can shut down twenty minutes earlier than it is supposed to, even when no programs are running. I’ve been testing it over the past week or so, just letting it run down to see where it gets to before closing down.”

SPOTD: “So it happens mainly when you’re using Word and Excel? There might be an error with those programs. I’ll put down there might be a problem with Word or Excel but that is a software issue and not covered under warranty.”

Me (frustrated): “But it is not a Word problem. It is not an Excel problem either. It’s a problem with the computer shutting down at the wrong time!  If you want, I can write down on the form what is happening, to make things easier.”

SPOTD (clueless about her impending doom): “No, no, it’s okay, it’s just as easy for me to write it.”

Me (silently): “No, it isn’t…”

Eventually, the message that she wrote was as follows : MESSAGE - “BATTERY LOW, CONNECT TO A MAIN SUPPLY”. I pushed hard, but she finally agreed to put “CHECK POWER SUPPLY” added on to that brief comment.

This was not exactly the way I would have described the problem if I’d written it myself, but she told me that before anyone began work on it, a technician would call me. I decided to cut my losses and just wait for the technician to call me, since if they had not begun work by that stage, then I could explain the exact nature of the problem.

Two days later, I got a call to say that someone had already looked at my computer, that it was a software issue and thus not covered under warranty, and I could come and pick it up. I went in to see what had been done to it. As far as I could tell, the technician, apparently having looked at the comments on the form, had turned the computer on, and seen it ran off the battery without problem.

I looked dubiously at the form that had been returned with the computer, but had no choice except to pay the $47.50 to get the computer back. I told the person behind the counter at the time that I’d like to speak to the technician to see whether the problem I described had been what he’d looked at, but the technician was apparently at lunch.

I took the computer home, plugged it in, charged it to full capacity, then ran it off the battery. With 19 minutes to go, the “5 minute” warning appeared and the machine promptly closed down.

So, because the original girl behind the counter was not prepared to let me describe the exact problem, I now have to go traipsing across to the service centre again to return the computer for the same reason I originally took it in.

Very frustrating indeed. With a bit of luck, she will be working again, and I can offer her my SPOTD award in person, then ask her to fetch someone else that is far more competent. Yes, I say what I think - when I have to do something twice through the fault of someone else who perhaps might need cue cards to remember the “inhale - exhale” concept, I get irritable.

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I’ve always said I am not immune from receiving this award, and I gave it to myself today, for a deserving act. I wanted to print out some spreadsheets, to have a hard copy of the data I’ve collected over the past few years, and the various manipulations I’ve done with that data.

The printer is located in the same room as the computer, and as soon as I saw it, I could see all was not well with the printer. The display, insteading of indicating it was ready, had a bright red flashing light, and informing me of a “40 MIO ERROR”. I was immediately disappointed since I did want to do some printing, and it looked like there would be problems. After all, what the hell is a “40 MIO ERROR”?

I hunted around in the room, and turned up a printer manual. Specifically, the smaller manual that has nice bright pictures of how to set up the printer when you take it out of the box, but not what to do when there is a problem. That information is located in the other printer manual, happily pointed out by the manual in my hands. 10 minutes of searching failed to unearth the second printer manual, so I sat down and wondered what to do.

I pushed all the buttons on the printer, even opening and closing the paper tray, to see if there might be a temporary glitch that sorted itself out through a non-related action to fix it. Alas, this was not the case, and 15 minutes after walking into the room to use the computer, I was still being mocked by the unknown “40 MIO ERROR” message. I decided at that point that the only option available to me was to connect to the net, surf over to the Hewlett-Packard site and hope they had online technical support.

I did this, and found that there is indeed a wealth of technical support at the site, just not for “40 MIO ERRORS”. I was getting desperate. I followed a link to see what the troubleshooting technique for a “79 ERROR” was, simply because it was an error with a number as well. I did what it suggested, but it did not solve my problem. Drat. So it would appear that the people at Hewlett-Packard did have a possible 79 errors, at least, that might occur with this printer.

I decided to give up. It did not look like I was going to be doing any printing. 40 minutes after I’d stepped in the room, I was no closer to the first page being printed than I was when I initially entered. I was putting the little manual back on the shelf, in preparating for leaving the room and going to take care of some other matters, and the back page fell open to reveal the section that had told me the troubleshooting section was in the other manual. Part of that was a line of text I’d overlooked originally, and I read it now with more interest, basically because I was accepting defeat. “Turn printer off and on again” was the instruction, and I figured there was nothing to lose by doing so.

Yes, you guessed it. After being turned off and on again, the printer quietly purred through the warm-up mode, and cheerily announced it was “READY” to print. Why exactly the simple act of turning it off and on again had not occurred to me, I can not say. I really don’t know.

However, after spending about three-quarters of an hour trying to find a solution to the “40 MIO ERROR” when I just had to flick the on/off switch a couple of times, I felt pretty idiotic. Thus, for my technical inadequacies, I awarded myself the SPOTD award.

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A few people replied to the effect that the main reason I find a lot of SPOTD award recipients is because I (a) am driving my car, and (b) go shopping late at night. Today, I took the public transport option, and caught a tram into the city to take care of some stuff. This allowed me to find my SPOTD winner and destroy the tentative theories that some of you were building.

I was leaving the city to go home after I’d finished my tasks, and there was a bit of a hold-up for the tram, meaning it was reasonably full when I boarded. I bought my ticket and went to find a seat. There were still enough seats scattered around the tram that it was possible to find a place to sit down, but there were a lot of people standing up in the aisle anyway.

I found a seat, and the tram continued to fill over the next few stops. There ended up being only one seat available when a mother and child got on to the tram. The child grabbed the seat quickly, while the mother struggled to remain upright on the moving vehicle with three bags of shopping. She was standing right next to me, and I was brought up to give my seat to women, the elderly, or the injured, if they were present and standing while I was seated. So I did the right thing, stood up, moved out of the road and offered her my seat.

That’s when I found my SPOTD.

The woman turned to face me, thanked me and then promptly turned back around, placed her bags of shopping on the seat, and remained standing, swaying all over the place. So there I was - I’d paid for a ticket to travel on the tram, I’d done the right thing and offered my seat to another person, and I was standing up and rolling from side to side, while bags of shopping rode on the seat…

The woman I had been sitting opposite from looked at the bags on the seat, then looked at me, and said in a loud voice trying to shame the mother “you could have stayed sitting down - she obviously doesn’t appreciate what you’ve done”. The mother turned around, glared at the seated woman, said something neither of us could hear, and faced the other way again.

A couple of stops later, the young man I’d been sitting next to got off, and the woman I’d offered the seat to began to move in, to get his seat, leaving her bags on the seat I had vacated for her. It was at that point I felt I could be only so obliging, and pushed in front of her to get the seat. She gave me a surprised “you are so rude” look, which I ignored. I’d given her my seat originally. I was not about to make the same mistake again.

A few stops later, she decided she did need to sit down, and rather than remove her shopping and sit down, simply perched on the remaining three square inches of seat that was available to her. Naturally, this put most of her body in the aisle, and since we were right next to the door, presented many problems for people getting on and off the tram. She remained seated that way until we reached her stop and she left the vehicle.

So there. Finding the SPOTD is not limited to driving my car, or shopping at night…

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A new one today. I usually have to leave the house to find my SPOTD, but today I found them when I was at home, by myself, offline, and despite this - it was not me that I found. I was merrily (?) working away at home on the computer and I heard a “BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP” noise come from the next room. It was not my usual mobile phone ring, so I thought it must have been Di’s mobile phone going off.

When I got to the next room, the noise had stopped, but since my phone was the only one on the table, I picked it up to find out why it had made a noise. On the screen was a message telling me there was a text message waiting for me to read. Since I rarely get text messages (2 in the past year), I was somewhat surprised and wondered who had sent me a message.

The message was from a phone number I did not know, and was obviously meant for someone else, since it read “DRUNK YET MADAM?”. It might be just me, but if you’re going to go to all the effort of typing in a message on a mobile phone keypad, which is not the easiest of tasks, it might be worth double-checking the number of the phone you’re trying to call.

In the absence of anyone else doing a dumber trick, this person received my SPOTD award. I considered sending a message back to tell them, but didn’t think it was worth the 20 cents it would have cost to send.

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