Here is a long, only tangentially related story about the computer usage habits of "normals" where the action, a system restart, is much less an indicator of the problem than the reason...
I was getting together with a bunch of high school friends after our first year of college. We were chatting about our experiences, and as tended to happen around myself and my computer savy friend, discussion of computer problems started. One person began sharing a problem that they have with their laptop where for some reason the keyboard "gets messed up" and numbers start appearing instead of letters. I thought it was amusing, until I was shocked to hear not one but three more people jump in and share that they've had the same strange problem. These weren't dumb people either, just not tech savy folks. I was about to explain the concept of numlock to them, when one of the people pointed out that the problem could be fixed with a reboot, and advised the others to try it the next time they encountered the issue.
As I said, not stupid people. Most of them were at ivy league institutions and have gone on to successful careers. They don't know jack about computers. These are the "normals" we have to make sure not to forget when we design software.
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Here is a long, only tangentially related story about the computer usage habits of "normals" where the action, a system restart, is much less an indicator of the problem than the reason...
I was getting together with a bunch of high school friends after our first year of college. We were chatting about our experiences, and as tended to happen around myself and my computer savy friend, discussion of computer problems started. One person began sharing a problem that they have with their laptop where for some reason the keyboard "gets messed up" and numbers start appearing instead of letters. I thought it was amusing, until I was shocked to hear not one but three more people jump in and share that they've had the same strange problem. These weren't dumb people either, just not tech savy folks. I was about to explain the concept of numlock to them, when one of the people pointed out that the problem could be fixed with a reboot, and advised the others to try it the next time they encountered the issue.
As I said, not stupid people. Most of them were at ivy league institutions and have gone on to successful careers. They don't know jack about computers. These are the "normals" we have to make sure not to forget when we design software.