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For those of us who lack the knowledge of how anything technical works, the idea and really joke of “did you try turning it off and on again?” is a practical and real approach to fixing a computer issue.

Largely, this is because yelling at your computer and calling it names rarely works and really only invites a strong sense of psychological supervision by those listening to one’s rants.

Monday morning, I proved that “did you try turning it off and on again?” can actually work and somehow it proved more irritating than when things weren’t working at all. It’s a paradox really.

It’s a strange concept many tech-idiots experience. Strictly speaking, it’s not supposed to work. When computers or programs have issues that keep things from working, in our minds anyway, we should by all rights be allowed to throw up our hands and let somebody much smarter figure it out.

Thus the IT professional steps in. That unsung hero that’s called in when something isn’t working and then quietly fades into the background as the problem goes back to being out of sight, out of mind.

I’ve been guilty of this from time to time, but now, thanks to our own IT professionals who have both talked me through a computer issue and in putting the sledgehammer down, I have just enough knowledge of computer maintenance to clearly invite computer tragedy down the road.

To my credit, I do know where my limitations are and really it’s at the point of trying what little I know and turning it off and on again, so roughly five minutes worth of work, unless it’s something I’ve had to work through in the past, and then it’s 10 minutes.

However, that still doesn’t really ease my emotions when something simple should work, but refuses to work and then suddenly becomes something akin to discovering dark matter or some such nonsense. At that step, it simply is too far out of my “expertise” to handle things calmly.

Case in point, I was supposed to send a large file to press Monday morning through an ftp server. I’m sure I’m selling this short, but it’s kind of a one-to-one program that allows a person to send directly to another secure location without having to email it.

It’s great for larger files when it works. Naturally, that was the root cause Monday because no matter how hard I attempted to make the connection using all the methods available to me in my little toy toolbox of tech tips, nothing lined up right.

Finally, I contacted the people on the other end, who are no doubt smarter than I am, to see what else we could do. After, of course, I tried swearing at my computer to no avail.

They were good enough to set me up with another connection that still didn’t work. This time, not only did I swear at my computer, but I threatened it with bodily violence should it not choose to work properly.

Again, nothing. Tried lower case letters, upper case letters, spaces, invoking lost and forgotten gods, a Tibetan shaman, more swearing and finally in a moment of pure and utter frustration, turned the program off for a little bit.

Naturally, I stewed about this for quite some time, choosing to distract myself for five minutes worth of Twitt…I mean X … or whatever the stupid social media site is these days.

That, naturally, did nothing to alleviate any of my ire because you know, X.

I thought about it a little bit and it slowly started to dawn on me. I’ve turned the program off … what if … what if I try turning it on again.

To be fair, I have tried this revolutionary idea for a while now, but would it work?

With the pinched face of somebody giving maximum effort, I brought the program up again and inputed the connection information and what do you know … it worked! I am a tech god!

I still swore and threatened it, but I got it to role and quickly, as if I was afraid it would stop working again, transferred the file and shut it off once the files went across.

“Hurrah!” I said inwardly, thrilled that now I could finally get on with the rest of my day, knowing full well that for us non computer people, turning it off and then on again really does work from time to time.

Just don’t expect a mood change.