Can Superstitions Solve Technical Problems?

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Cultura e processo

Compiler • • Can Superstitions Solve Technical Problems? | Compiler

Can Superstitions Solve Technical Problems? | Compiler

About the episode

We all know not to walk under a ladder. Or break a mirror. Or do anything that may incur the wrath of the paranormal. Superstitions linger, even in places you may not expect. The devices, software, and general technology we use every day spring from the progression of science. But that doesn’t stop us from coming up with new superstitions.

From blowing into cartridges to waving cell phones in the air, we’ve come up with some fixes that technically don’t make a lot of sense. We ask a few people from tech support whether superstitions have a useful role in solving our technical difficulties.

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Brent, Angela, I've got a bit of a strange question for you today. All right. Are you superstitious? I will say, I am not particularly superstitious. Okay, no fun. Angela, what about you? No fun. I'm a little superstitious, but not really. Does that make sense? Tell me a little bit more about that. I mean, there are certain things that I always believed growing up, and although I don't really believe them, I still kind of practice them. What are some of your superstitions? So, you don't put your purse on the floor. You don't put a hat on the bed. Okay. There's a couple more, and one just sounds as dumb as the other, but they were just superstitions I heard growing up. And although I don't really believe them, I still don't put my purse on the floor or put hats on the bed. What do you think is going to happen? Putting your purse on the floor means you will always be broke, like you'll never have money. And if you put a hat on the bed, you're going to have bad luck. And I don't want either of those to occur, so I try to make sure I follow them. Not that I believe them or anything. No, no, no, no. You never know. Yeah, they become sort of a habit, even if they're not necessarily something that you believe in. Exactly. Okay. Well, recently, Angela, you had a Twitter thread about tech superstitions. Are there any of the responses that stood out to you? My favorite was the Kuai Kuai culture where they leave snacks around the office. That was my absolute favorite. If you want to keep the machines happy and the machine gremlins happy, leave them snacks. That one was my favorite because snacks, I mean, snacks. So, that brings us to the discussion for today's episode, which revolves around tech superstitions. There are some things that people do in the tech industry, and outside the tech industry, but that revolve around tech, that are solutions to problems that aren't necessarily helping in the way that we think. And so, I wanted to find out more about where these came from and how they work, and what's actually going on behind the scenes. So, I went to the people in tech support, and I had a question for them. Can superstitions solve technical problems? This is Compiler, an original podcast from Red Hat. We're your hosts. I'm Brent Simoneaux. And I'm Angela Andrews. We're here to break down questions from the tech industry. Big, small, and sometimes strange. Each episode, we go out in search of answers from Red Hatters and people they're connected to. Today's question, can superstitions solve tech problems? Producer Johan Philippine is here to share the magic. So, there's this really great quote from a sci-fi author, Arthur C. Clarke. And he says that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Now, Brent, this really resonates with me, and I assume it does for you as well. Because when things work, it's fantastic, but when they stop working, I have no idea what's going on or how to fix it. It's like the magic has gone. Do you feel that way, too? Yeah, I really do. I work in the tech industry, but I am a writer. So, I really consider myself to be tech adjacent more than anything else. So, I am constantly surrounded by people who know more than I do. And I'm amazed by this. I'm amazed by what the people around me can do. And it honestly feels like magic sometimes. I spoke to Connelly Simmons who really embraces the idea that there's a little bit of magic involved. He uses it every day in his role as tech support for live events here at Red Hat. Here's what he had to say. We don't mind if people think of us as wizards. We're just plain old ordinary men and women doing perhaps special magic with our technology to make their jobs easier and make their connections more real. So, I don't mind being called a wizard. I wouldn't mind if it was on the bridge of a starship, either. My husband works in tech support, and he always says he is a technician, not a magician. Wait, what's the difference between the two? Probably not much. Connelly actually talks about this a little bit. Well, I was thinking about this, and I'm not really sure what the difference is when it comes to technology, what the difference is between them on the spectrum, on one end there's just flat out superstition. You believe that there are supernatural causes for things that you can either encourage or prohibit, I suppose. And on the other end is best practices. And somewhere in the middle is ritual and habit. And so, I don't think I'm superstitious, per se, but I would say I have rituals and best practices that probably border on superstition to the outside observer. There's very few things that are irretrievable. There are very few situations you can't recover from. And so, they see that as wizardry. We see that as good technical best practice, technical acumen, and customer care. And so, I guess we are seen as wizards or some sort of superheroes, but really it's just the ability to act fast, quickly, and for everyone's good. Angela, do I remember this correctly? You actually have experience in tech support, right? As a matter of fact, I do. That's where I started. Did you ever come across any customers who had some supernatural explanations for fixes that they were doing on their own? Oh yes. I have heard some really wild stories as to why things work. There's some doozies out there. Well, from the conversations I've had for this episode, that doesn't sound like a unique experience. The next person I spoke to, Troy McNish, he's definitely encountered some questionable superstitions. If you're going to have them, have some solid ones. It's funny because you run into... I think coming from the meeting and support side with so many years of experience, you run into people who have more superstitions than you do. For example, I remember this one gentleman who I went to mic him up before he was set to speak, and I went and put a lavalier on his tie. And he's like, "No, no, no, no, no, no." I'm like, "Okay. So, you're going to be speaking." He's like, "Yeah." He said, "No, we cannot put these $50 microphones on my $500 tie. I will have a bad talk." The back of my mind, I wanted to say, "Well, no problem. I'll do that just to hear your $20 presentation. But hey, if that's your superstition, no problem. I'll help you out." So, I ended up putting it on his lapel on his jacket. I have never heard anything like that. Superstitions affect his job, but he can deal with those pretty easily. He does have a pet peeve about misplaced blame. People who aren't in tech naturally have this superstition about technology just not working, or they have a superstition about if something goes wrong, it's the technology. One of the phrases I just dislike, it's like please take this out of our vocabulary as a phrase, is sorry we're experiencing technical difficulties. Because people use it for reasons that are not technical. And I'll go back to a time. I was running an event in a hotel banquet room. And this was years before Red Hat, early in my career. And I'll never forget. The banquet is going. Everything is going great. The speaker's up there, he sounds great. And then out of nowhere, the banquet table in the middle of the room collapses. So, what does he say? He says, "Hey, sorry, everyone. We're going to deal with this. I know right now we're experiencing some technical difficulties, but we're going to fix this and we'll come back." And I'm like, no, we're not experiencing technical difficulties. I wanted to get up there on a mic and say, "Yeah, I'm sorry. Due to his voice, it caused vibration in the room and made that table fall." But Troy has a technique for handling customers and distress, and it makes use of one of the oldest tricks in the book. Rebooting your computer or laptop usually takes about two to three minutes for you to shut down for it to go through its cycle and come back up and rejoin in a meeting or event, or if it's something like the platform we're in today. It takes time to do that. It takes three or four minutes. Really what that does is it does a few things. We don't tell them this, but this is what it does. It gives them time to think about what they did wrong and what will really fix the problem. It gives us time to not hear the person for three or four minutes while we try and figure out in our head what can be going wrong. And then, if you're lucky, it will fix the problem. So, that is the number one fix that I use, and it works, it works, it works. I actually like those. I like when stuff just starts working. I like when you can just say reboot and the problem goes away. I like it when as soon as you get on the call and it's like, "Yes, how can I help you?" Oh my God, it's working. My problem's solved. Those are the best ones. That has happened to me so many times. Sometimes you just have to make the call. Angela, do you remember that story from your Twitter feed about someone hitting their computer just right to get it started? Yes. Yes, I do. How did that work? It was a repeatable process. You had to hold your hand a certain way and smack it three times. And how did they know it worked? It worked once, it worked the second time. Every time they did it, it just kept on working. That's the process. Angela, I'm on your Twitter feed right now, and I'm looking at this, and it is very specific. Very. It's very specific. It's like you had to hit the side of this box, he's talking about this computer, with an open palm like Brett Farve smacking a teammate three times. On the third time you held your hand on it until it stopped vibrating, then it would boot. This is very specific. It's a repeatable process, But how did he even figure it out, right? You have to hit it three times in a very specific spot and then hold it. Because four is too much. Yeah. Yeah, four's too much, two wasn't enough. How do you figure that out? He figured it out. He did. But that brings me to the next question that I have about these superstitions, which is where do they come from? So, I spoke to Andy Mosley and he had a few theories of its own. It's dictating too many habits. Because ideas, you do a superstitious thing in order to get a desired outcome. Right? So, if you tell yourself I'm only wearing left socks every day so that you get a promotion, and then you do that for a year and you still didn't get a promotion, you've just formed a bad habit and not necessarily gotten a desired outcome. Yeah, what happens when the superstition takes over your life? Ask a sports fan. Oh. You're from Philadelphia. Oh God, we're the worst best sports fans ever. There's so many superstitions, especially around the playoffs. You've done things all season. Don't stop doing them now. You do not want to jinx the team. What I found really interesting is the reason behind forming these superstitions or these bad habits. Right? It's the idea that you're doing these things out of a desire to control a situation that's difficult to understand. Now he mentioned that he himself was a bit of a superstitious person. But in our conversation, he revealed how his career in tech support really helped him gain control and scale back on those superstitions. I wonder if that's because I've been in IT and that I have more control over that, which in the end with superstition, that becomes what it's all about. You want to have some control over something, so you do a thing to get a desired outcome. IT has at least trained me how to have better control over my technology. It's how we approach those unknowns that really separates the professional person, an IT tech support person, from the layperson. And the solutions we come up with end up being completely different. Right? On the one hand, you have the dedicated professionals who know how to find a solution and find one that's based in technical knowledge. And then there's the rest of us who sometimes poke around and happen upon a solution that may or may not be a little bit more superstitious in nature. I've turned into the latter. Yeah? Really? Pretty much. Yeah, I mean, this is where I'm comfortable now. I'm not in tech support anymore, and I don't have the policies and procedures to guide me through the myriad of problems that I could be introduced with in any given day. Now it's, yeah, maybe I can figure it out. It's more magic now than it was before. I can fix something? What? That's really surprising to me, because from what I understood, once you're in tech support, the genie's out of the bottle and all the magic has gone, right? Do you know how many years ago that was? Do you know much technology has changed since I was in tech support? Do you go to tech support now, Angela? I try not to. I really try to figure things out for myself. But sometimes I do have to reach out to tech support to get help or to get access to something, but the old Angela would really be cringing at that right now. We've been talking about how people in tech support are able to solve a lot of problems. And they've got this huge bank of knowledge to go back on to fix problems very quickly, but they obviously don't start there. Right? I'm going to go back to Connelly for a second. In our conversation, he brought up something very interesting to me which was epistemology. The study of epistemology is what we know about what we know. And really smart people will approach any sort of an issue and go, clearly I don't know something here, because this wouldn't be a reality if I did know everything and had done everything right. So, Connelly is telling us and showing us that even with all of his years of experience, he doesn't always have the answers. And that's pretty encouraging for me as a layperson. Yeah, this makes me wonder if there's a reason we call it computer science, because a big part of science is not knowing. And even when you do know things, that knowledge is always tentative, right? That knowledge can always be updated once we find out that something else is true. That's exactly right. It is a science behind it, the way computers work, the way code works. So, you have to follow your hypothesis, but if it proves not to be true, you have to pivot. You can't go down a rabbit hole if it's not yielding you any results. You have to be quick to pivot and move in another direction. I think so much of the time I'm trying to demonstrate to everyone around me how much I know. But it sounds like from what Connelly is saying that it is just as important to recognize and share when we don't know something. Yeah. As methodical and scientific and studious as you can be, there's always going to be something that you don't understand. Always. Always. But if you know what to look for, there's often a solution that can be explained. All right. So, we're going to do something that's a little fun. Fun? Fun, yeah. I never trust you when you say something's going to be fun. Is that something that happens a lot? I don't feel like I... Anyway, I figured there's this ‘magicians’ aspect of our guests, and I wanted to see if they could explain why they think some of these weird fixes work. First up is blowing into a video game cartridge. Tried and true. Our first guest to answer the question is Connelly Simmons. My first response is going to be because of dust. If I remember correctly, the old cartridges had those blade connectors. So, they were these very wide... They weren't pin connectors like we have in a lot of things now. They were blade connectors. I have a feeling that you were setting the cartridge down next to the TV when you weren't using it. So, if you ever had a... I'll just pick a game. If you had a Mario cartridge and A Legend of Zelda cartridge, you couldn't have them both in the machine, and you'd set it down next to the TV. Well, the television is a notorious static discharge device, and especially in the old tube TVs, right? So, you're setting the cartridge down in an electric field full of dust, and it's going to collect dust. So, when you blew into the cartridge, you made sure that the connection was going to be crisp. And not everybody had a Q-tip and a bottle of denatured alcohol to clean their cartridge blades, right? So yeah, blowing in it, dust, and the static. Yep, that's what I'm going with. I want to challenge this theory, and here's the evidence that I would like to put in front of you. Oh, evidence. Is the place next to your TV more dusty than the rest of the house? Yes. Really? What was the question? Is the space next to your TV more dusty than the rest of your house? That's what I thought you said. Hell yeah. All of the house dust sits right there on the console where the television is. Really? So, maybe there is something to this. Yes. So, my television sits in front of the air conditioning vent and next to the stairs. So, you're getting everything coming through the air vent, and the dust and dog hair and what the heck coming off the stairs. There's people running up and down. It is the dirtiest place in my house. You literally have to sweep behind it. That's where all the dust goes, every last dust bunny. And somehow it gets into the cartridge. Yeah. Little bunnies just getting in there. Every time. Little dust bunnies crawling up in there. So, we just blow them out. That's not the only theory. And Brent, I think Andy Mosley's answer is going to resonate with you a little more. Let's hear what he had to say. Okay. Yeah, so we argued about this back and forth for quite a while. Right? And we were saying one camp came down that it works because there's the copper connectors within the cartridge. When you blow into it, you're blowing the dust out of it. Therefore when you plug the cartridge in, it's making that connection easier so it goes through. Right? My only issue with that is that you shouldn't have to do that every time. If you have that big of a dust problem that you have to blow it out every single time. Right? It should be something maybe you have to do every once in a while, not this does not work every single time. I would contend that something was probably bent either inside the machine or the cartridge itself and it's not making the connection properly, and that blowing on it, you just happen to get lucky and it worked that time. And I had that classic NES, so I remember doing this. Even the way you would push it in. You can slam that thing in there and push it down really hard, or do you talk to it real gently and try to coax it in there. I guess this is where the superstition would come back into, how nice were you to your Nintendo? Little things like that that make a difference, too. It's where the user side comes into it a little bit. Well, how are you treating your games? So, I think we did come down on the solution that it was, yeah, you did it so that the connections were more clear, but I'm not entirely sold on it. Because like I said, if you are having to blow out your cartridge every single time, then you may have a bigger issue. See, this is what I'm saying. We don't live in the dust bowl. How much dust is there? Just one little bunny, just one little speck. It just takes one? That's all it takes. I don't know how much it takes. I will say, I think I'm more in line with Andy than I am with Connelly on this one. I don't buy the dust thing. Then what do you think it is? I don't know. But honestly, I think Andy's closer. That's just me. That's just me. Okay. So, maybe it's just the magic of your breath on the connectors. It's like pixie dust. I don't know. Maybe that has something to do with it. And it makes you feel better. No? No, no. I'm saying that's real interesting. We should really hear what Troy has to say, because that sounds very much like what his answer was all about. Oh, okay. It works, it works, it works. Not only does it work, and I'm going to tell you why it works. But not only does it work, it works because there's a simple thing called, go back to it, superstition. And I say I'm not superstitious. This is almost fact. Even if you just go back and try it. If you get an old game system, and not even old game system. I did this with my son's X-Box One, and it worked. Game wouldn't work. I took the CD out. I blew on it. And he's looking at me like, oh dude, you're crazy. What are you doing? Hey, I'm about to teach you something. I put it back in and it works. I think it's something that they make into the cartridge that's just... I don't know if it's our breath. I don't know what it is. We're just giving a little love, and it appreciates it, and it works. That is my favorite, favorite answer. Just giving it a little love. Just give it a little love. Okay. All right. Next up, turning it off and turning it back on again. It's a classic, but how does it actually work? Here's Connelly Simmons. Because electricity has both persistence and memory. Electricity has a personality. I think that what we're doing now is we've made that into a digital world modern advice in that once we supercharge our devices and we're sending power to all the different pieces in the chipset that just like humans, humans need... I mean, I would tell this to a human. Unplug yourself, walk away, go breathe, don't do anything. I don't mean don't think about the problem. I mean, don't do anything. Go sit still in quiet. I used to have to unplug things, and we would count to 20. It'd be 20 seconds before you plugged it back in, because you needed all that built up electricity to go out into the universe and dissipate. Sometimes devices need a break from that. I don't know if that's the right answer or if that's the true answer, but I believe in it. Now that's something I still do when unplugging devices. I still wait 15, 20 seconds because that's something my dad taught me to do. Yeah, me too. That's where superstitions come from. The whole purse thing, where'd that come from? Well, my grandmother told me that. Oh, see? She passed it on to me. All right. And then the last one we've got queued up is Andy's answer to what he calls... The best fix of all time. That works for a number of things. Computers like to sleep and turn off just like we do, and they fix a lot of their own issues by doing that. That's the simplest way to say it. There's a lot of more technical ways. It's flushing its RAM, it's getting rid of temporary files, things like that. But yeah, leaving your computer on for months at a time is bad. I mean, just put it that way. It likes to go to sleep. It likes to be turned off and turned back on. We always know that it's annoying having to wait those few minutes for everything to boot back up. You had all your a hundred tabs open. We get it. But you're going to get better performance and faster performance at every computer by actually turning on and off again. And like I said, it's just because it does a bunch of its own simple little self-fixing tasks when it does that that it just doesn't do when it's on all the time, Humans and computers, sometimes they both need to power down from time to time. Yeah, what I thought was really interesting is that both Andy and Connelly made that connection independently of one another, thinking that computers, just like humans, need to have some time to disconnect and turn off. Yeah. I love what he said there, they just fix a lot of their own issues by doing that. I agree. I think that's how I'm going to think about sleeping from now on. I'm just fixing a lot of my own issues by doing that. I love it. All right. Johan, Angela, let's come back to today's question. Can superstitions solve tech problems? What do you think? I think so. It's like we were just talking about with sleep, right? I personally don't know how sleeping or turning a computer on and off again is going to help me fix my problems, but I get that expected result. And as long as it works, I don't really need to understand how it works. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Angela, I'm wondering if you are still going to not put your purse on the floor. I will not be putting my purse on the floor. I've done this for way too long to give it up now. So, it doesn't hurt anything, so I'll just keep doing it. Some things don't change. Exactly. And that does it for this episode of Compiler. Today's episode was produced by Johan Philippine and Caroline Creaghead. Victoria Lawton is the magician who makes the show sparkle. Our audio engineer is Kristie Chan. Special thanks to Shawn Cole. Our theme song was composed by Mary Ancheta. A super thank you to Connelly Simmons, Troy McNish, and Andy Mosley for sharing their magic tricks. Our audio team includes Leigh Day, Laura Barnes, Claire Allison, Nick Burns, Aaron Williamson, Karen King, Boo Boo Howse, Rachel Ertel, Mike Compton, Ocean Matthews, and Laura Walters. If you like the show, please follow us for future episodes. All right. See you next time. See you soon.

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