I learned a funny thing about the human mind this morning.
Last night I was trying to lodge a service request with IBM for my ThinkPad Edge—very, very poor quality, if I do say so myself. From a few days ago, the screen started blanking (with the laptop going into suspend) at random, though it seemed to happen most often while Misty and I were watching a DVD. It’d happen when I was using the keyboard, when I wasn’t, DVD or no DVD, eventually becoming more and more common.
This started to really frustrate me, coupled with the fact that Linux 2.6.32 seems to have a 1 in 3 chance of failing to resume from suspend on it. “Preferences -> Power Management” lets you stop it from suspending (it only locks the screen), but that was still really annoying. It turns out gnome-power-management has keys in gconf where you can actually disable any behaviour at all—I discovered that yesterday. That was ideal, but the word “ideal” is laughable when it meant that, by this stage, the LCD backlight would turn off after a few seconds of use (and with it the external monitor also turns off—the computer seemingly under the belief that I’m closing the lid?), and it would take a lot of moving the laptop’s lid back and forth before I’d just strike an angle that would leave it on for a few seconds more.
I had a go at taking it apart, but I couldn’t find the mechanism that signals whether or not the lid is closed (nothing obviously magnetic, either). I hadn’t seen any of this behaviour while using Windows on the machine, so I tried rebooting into Windows, but the symptoms were steadily getting worse.
I decided it high time to get IBM onto the scene (as they provide support for Lenovo’s machines, the two being mostly one and the same, now). I discovered that applying a strong pressure to the part of the laptop just to the right of the keyboard (near the return key and so on) actually caused the LCD to work. I had to keep it there though. This was frustrating.
So, there I am, frustratingly trying to navigate Lenovo’s support website (to lead me to IBM’s “Electronic Service Call+” website), trying to login, all with my right hand applying a firm pressure to this area right next to the keyboard. No fun.
I imagine that, when I signed up to Lenovo’s website back when I purchased the laptop, that ID may extend to IBM’s website, so I try logging in with that email address. No deal! I can’t find any password configuration that works. I choose “Forgot my password”. And here’s where the whole point of this entry comes in.
My secret question comes up, and it looks nothing like a secret question I’d ever set:
(3 * 2) * (3 * 1.5 * 2) =
That’s it. I look at it and think—surely this isn’t mine. The email address sure is, though. It annoys me that they have no recourse of “send password reset link to email”. Working from the left, I get 3×2=6, 6×3=18, 18×1.5=27, 27×2=54. I enter “54″. No dice. “fiftyfour”. Nope. “fifty four”. Nuh-uh. “fifty-four”. Nothing works.
Annoyed, I give up and register for a new account with my work address (this is all with my hand on the right side of my laptop). It takes an agonisingly long time to do that, and then even longer to lodge an “electronic service call”, the form for which seems designed more for companies with thousands of IBM assets than anything else. They even asked me for a “priority”. Sure, I’ll pick “highest”.
This morning, I wake up after some really, really strange dreams, and as I slowly manage to come to reality, Misty and I start chatting. Half-way through a sentence, I realise my brain has been working out the equation as it was written; by this stage I couldn’t remember the right hand side, but I remember that it was 6x=54 and—of course, 6 × 9! Though I’ve not heard the radio play in years, nor read the books, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy came to me at once, and I knew the answer must be 42.
I sprang out of bed and found the log-in form, filled out all the information, and voilà—success.
The human mind sure is strange.
