Self-Healing Hardware: Not Always A Good Thing

What's worse than a broken gadget? A gadget that won't stay broken.

I had the opportunity to ponder this paradox earlier today. I'd showed up at a Sprint service center on L Street downtown to get a malfunctioning phone looked at. Sometime Friday morning, this Palm Centro had refused to pick up or play any sound during phone calls -- as if it had convinced itself that I had a hands-free kit plugged in. (Weirder yet, when I did plug in a wired hands-free kit, I could hear the other party, but the other party couldn't hear me.)

Nothing cured this utterly exasperating behavior -- not rebooting the phone, not taking its battery out for a few minutes, not hard-resetting it to wipe its memory clean. I'd even seen a report of the same problem online, with only one remedy suggested: replacing the offending phone.

So after a weekend of being reduced to text messaging, followed by a 20-minute wait to sit down with a store rep, I was looking forward to a quick swap of my phone with a new model. I explained the problem to this guy, then told him I'd show it by calling my work phone. Except this time, the speakerphone button on the screen didn't vanish once the call connected, and I could hear the conversation through the phone like usual.

I stammered for a moment, saying something along the lines of "Huh..." I tried another call and verified that the Centro's speakerphone also worked. Then I made some lame joke about how I'd need to return to his desk to make all my calls from now on, thanked him for his time and proceeded to my office -- wondering if the rep was now thinking "yet another bozo who wasted my time because he panicked the first time something didn't work."

I was also imagining the phone's next move -- things that fix themselves on their own often break on their own again just as easily.

It's difficult not to view this kind of situation without a certain level of paranoia. As in: This phone has a mind of its own, and it's out to get me! It chose to fail in a spectacularly inconvenient manner, than waited to start working again until it could cause as much embarrassment as possible -- yet leave me no choice but to keep it around.

This isn't the first time this has happened to me. How about you? How often have you found that the only way to get a gadget or a program working again is to try to replicate its failure after waiting on hold or on a line to talk to a tech-support rep?

Comments

This is an example of Worth's Law, which states that a malfunctioning appliance will work perfectly when shown to the repairman. See

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trivia_Encyclopedia

Posted by: Herb Huston | August 4, 2008 3:06 PM | Report abuse

Doesn't most people's cars do the same thing once they get to the mechanic? What's worse is when a tech says "that's what it is supposed to do" and they are clearly wrong.

Posted by: Steven | August 4, 2008 3:10 PM | Report abuse

Just like the singing frog.

Posted by: Ronnie | August 4, 2008 3:40 PM | Report abuse

This happens to me all the time and I always compare it to the noise that goes away when I drive to the mechanics.

Luckily (well maybe not) I have enough issues with my tech devices that I still end up having to wait for help and I am able to regenerate the problem. My SOP now is that the problem has to happen on 3 different days before I go for help so I can minimize the number of times I'm embarassed.

Posted by: Washington, DC | August 4, 2008 4:05 PM | Report abuse

I've run into this quite a few times.

There's an apocryphal story out there about a computer tech who had this one customer whose computer would only work when he (the tech) was trying to diagnose. Finally, in frustration, he taped a picture of himself to the inside of the case.

No doubt that computer's still working flawlessly. :-)

Posted by: Blair | August 4, 2008 5:56 PM | Report abuse

Palm phones are the only "software controlled" headset I've ever run into. Rather than mechanically switch the audio to a headset, Palm senses the connected headset and makes the shift in software. The sensor attempts to recognize high impedance (microphone) from low impedance (speakers) to switch mono or stereo - reusing the microphone path for the second channel of audio.

I've read people who solved similar problems by blowing air into the headphone plug to remove a presumed bit of dust or dirt that causes the phone to detect a headphone.

Posted by: cwwees | August 6, 2008 10:29 PM | Report abuse

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