Reboot or Wizardy

So to better understand this story, I’ll have to give you a little more background about the character named IT guy. He is in his mid thirties and full of voice. By that I mean, he doesn’t understand what an inside voice really is. This can be explained by his once ended Football career (knee injury), then transformed into a know it all football coach (but not really), and then after being fired for several losing seasons, he studied IT. He once yelled at someone on the phone with the words, and I quote “I will throw a phonebook at you, seriously a phonebook”. Some questions I had for him, where the hell was he going to find a phonebook, I thought those were like the Sears Catalog, dead in the 90’s. I also wanted to ask him, out of all things to throw… why a phonebook. Now that you got some knowledge on the character I will explain the story.

I was at work, doing my normal worky stuff. Here comes some high official who is having computer problems. Apparently he acquired a pretty bad virus over the weekend. Well the IT guy is thrown back, because he invested in the best anti-virus software out there, so it’s very unlikely that some virus got through. But he took a look at it and decided it needed a reboot. After the guy told him that it wouldn’t work, and that the computer had serious problems he continued to demand a reboot. Now my question to him is what the hell does a reboot do that magically fixes things. It’s not a reformat (which starts your computer from scratch), but rather just gives you a new set of downs, or a new inning. It really just starts from where you left off, so I doubt a reboot would “kill” the virus. Now he insisted that it needed a reboot, and refused to look at the computer until the reboot occurred. My solution to the company. If all of our IT problems can be solved with a reboot, why don’t we fired the “football” coach, and forward all of his calls to me , which I will pick up the phone and declare a reboot is needed. Because the Reboot is the Witch Doctor of the IT world. No one really knows why (or how) it fixes things, but it always does, always makes the computer (or phone) faster. So no need for IT Hogwarts, just say reboot.