My computer's crashed! I've lost everythi… oh, never mind, it's working again

In the spirit of environmentalism, this week’s column is brought to you through the medium of recycling. I wrote this five New Year’s Eves ago and present it to you again – with updates where appropriate – because the ‘TalatObig’ acronym deserves a revival for 2023.

“I have something to show you,” she purrs, reclining suggestively across the sofa. “Come and have a peek.”

This invitation from Mme D is irresistible. But just as soon as I kick off my slippers, don my welding goggles and settle down beside my wife, she sits up abruptly and exclaims: “Sorry, no, it's not there any more!”

Such is middle age. Regretfully, I slip back out of the radiation suit and sorrowfully return the spanners to their kitchen drawer.

On the other hand, I may have misread the situation. It turns out my wife wanted me to witness the curious behaviour of the web browser on her smartphone. By the time I had brought myself within the requisite witnessing distance and field of vision, the problem somehow went away by itself.

This is good news. It means my innate ability to solve IT issues simply by bringing my aura within the proximity of an offending device has returned after a year-long hiatus.

Readers of the previous incarnation of this column at The Register may remember that my presence normally, or should I say paranormally, has a calming effect on other people’s machines. While many unfortunate humans endure all kinds of electronics going haywire as soon as they touch the ON switch, I have the opposite effect as soon as I step over to take a look.

I do not even need to lay my healing hands on the kit. I only have to stand listlessly nearby for everything to sort itself out – completely, instantly and always before I have even had the chance to see what the problem was.

On occasions when I go away on business, I’ll switch on my mobile in the Arrivals hall to be welcomed by a string of alarming texts and voicemails from home to tell me the broadband router isn't working, the drains have blocked up and the gas boiler has broken down. The moment I step through my front door a couple of days later, the router spontaneously springs back into life, the toilet clears itself with a satisfying gurgle, and when I go to take a shower, the hot water takes my skin off.

This skill has set me in good stead during periods of customer support: it doesn’t matter whether or not I know a system inside out, all that’s required to solve glitches or get it up and running after an inexplicable freeze is to walk over to the panicked user’s desk. Before I have even bent down to look over the user's shoulder, he or she cries out: “It's not doing it now!”

Admittedly, it has proved a little frustrating when I conduct in-person software training, as it means I never get to see what’s going wrong on trainees’ screens before it spookily rights itself as soon as it senses my presence.

Even more freakily in the current era of remote online training, all the trainee has to do is type a request for assistance in the Chat window. Even from a distance of hundreds, maybe thousands, of miles, as soon as I utter “Hey, Ranjit, I understand you have a problem…” Ranjit is tapping a follow-up message to say that everything is working OK now.

The one disadvantage of such an ability is that it renders me less than useful when working in a team of beta testers running through UAT scripts. Nothing ever seems to fail until I walk away from my desk for a toilet break.

My talent left me, temporarily, for a year. It was a difficult 12 months, as you can imagine. My training courses were replete with catastrophic freezes and crashes, undocumented dialogue windows, error messages fonted in Cyrillic, OS language switching spontaneously to Cantonese, and display performance visuals reminiscent of T-Rex on Top Of The Pops.

Throughout that year I witnessed software problems I never imagined possible. For example, emails would appear, vanish and then re-appear, jumping between various folders and labels with shameless abandon.

On one user's machine, I saw a virus checker contrive to put itself into quarantine. On another, I saw how every click on a program menu would launch Spotify in the background and immediately begin streaming a random song by Justin Bieber. I saw attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate.

Time to die? Not quite, but I did see a pink screen of death.

You can imagine my delight when I finally broke this hoodoo, at around this time of the year too. As soon as the neighbours heard, I found myself repeatedly being called over to look at mischievous gadgets, computers, thermostats, toggles, switches and taps… only to be told “Don't worry, it’s working again!” before I got the slightest peek.

Such a thing is annoying and satisfying in equal measure.

Surely I can't be the only IT professional (of sorts) to experience being called over by a user to investigate an issue and then told not to bother just as you present yourself at their desk? Clearly, this phenomenon needs a name. More than that, since it is IT-related, it needs its own acronym.

Here we go: TALATOBIG.

Or if you prefer lower case with intercaps, try ‘TalatObig’. The stress should be pronounced on the first and third syllables, as in TAH-laht-O-big.

TALATOBIG stands for “Take A Look At This Oh Bugger It's Gone”.

Come on, it’s no worse than the Linux kernel team’s suggestion FUCKWIT (the strenuously contrived “Forcefully Unmap Complete Kernel With Interrupt Trampolines”) and still marginally better than Joe 90’s Dad's BIG RAT (“Brain Impulse Galvanoscope Record And Transfer”) which, as any Gerry Anderson fan would know, was the proto-Matrix skill-upload tech inflicted on 9-year-old Joe 90 by his own father.

I dare say it’s catchier than my Lovecraftesque-sounding IKABAI-SITAL which, although never catching on, had its fans back in the day. Both are due for a revival, I think.

Anyway, I hope that the New Year brings you more TALATOBIGs than FUCKWITs, and may BIG RAT never be invented for real otherwise my training gig’s heading down the pan.

On the other hand, I suppose Joe 90’s creepy lab-coated Dad (Dr Ninety?) could always hire me for my TALATOBIG and IKABAI-SITAL skills to keep BIG RAT running smoothly.

If all else fails, there are other methods to train Joe 90 into a fighter pilot, circus acrobat, rocket scientist, brain surgeon or kung fu expert. Judging by modern professional standards, I understand you can achieve this by WAFVOYT*.

*WAFVOYT [waff-voyt]: Watching A Few Videos On YouTube