When a client begins the conversation by saying “I’m not very computer savvy”, I usually breathe a sigh of relief.  People who aren’t experts and know it are a whole lot less difficult to deal with that people who aren’t experts but think they are.  The ones who know they’re not experts don’t tend to do silly things with their computers because they’re a little bit scared they might break it, whereas people who think they’re hot stuff tend to get into all sorts of trouble.

It’s not always the case, though: sometimes the self-professed experts avoid trouble by sheer luck, and that’s usually a pleasant experience for them and me, even if easy problems don’t pay as well as difficult ones.

Case in point: Graeme, a retired architect with the most amazing collection of computer hardware, who loves to fiddle with all the settings.  I could tell one of his computers apart from anyone else’s with ease: if it’s got a weird Start menu and a bunch of desktop accessories I’ve never seen before and a strange colour scheme and a menu bar that almost works, then it probably belongs to Graeme.

So it was, when he called me bright and early one Saturday morning, that I was expecting a long and drawn out process of debugging some new “clever” program he’d installed to turn his mouse cursor into Mickey Mouse or make the time display in his task bar tell the time in Latin.  He told me he had just installed a program to do something cunning on his desktop and now his keyboard didn’t work.  I came over and made ready to do battle with the slings and arrows of outrageous shareware.

When I got there, he showed me the login screen and the keyboard, the one utterly uninfluenced by the other.  The mouse was fine, but the keyboard, rather a nice Logitech wireless with, of course, all sorts of customisation options, appeared dead.

I have a standard set of diagnostics I follow in cases like this.  The first is: is it plugged in?  It doesn’t apply here, because wireless keyboards don’t have anything to plug in, but I opened it up and fiddled with the batteries anyway.

When I did, the keyboard came to life, just for a moment.  Wait… could it be that easy?  I asked if he had a couple more batteries, and after some rummaging in the kitchen drawer he reported that he did.  I replaced the batteries in the keyboard, closed the cover, and hit a few keys.  It was fully operational!  All that complicated software was innocent, in this case: the problem was a couple of flat batteries!

Graeme was somewhat embarrassed, I think, but I reassured him.  He’d had this keyboard for two or three years, and never needed to change the batteries before.  They were very good ones, top of the range, with a life span far beyond your bog-standard Evereadies.  It was entirely reasonable to just forget that battery power was an issue. It wasn’t like smoke alarms that need changing every time the federal Liberal Party changes leaders; this was some seriously reliable technology.

So I charged him half price, because I couldn’t really demand a full hour’s payment for a five-minute fix, and left him with his weird desktop widgets and a really shockingly reliable wireless keyboard.  I wish I could afford hardware that rock-steady, but I’m rather harsh on my equipment and I’d probably just end up breaking it, which is not good financial management.  After all, I’m not the IT millionaire, I’m just the IT blacksmith.