Off topic: Computer catastrophes

[Patricia M Godfrey pmgodfrey@xxxxxxxx]

I'm probably going to get flamed for wasting time and bandwidth, but
Martin's tale of the overzealous housekeeper reminded me of the time a
friend's kitten strolled across his (open, working) laptop keyboard and
just managed to hit the keys that invoked the number-pad overlay. The
friend called me with frantic pleas for help, and when he couldn't find
the docs that specified the correct keys to hit, I had to tell him to
shut down and restart.

The point is that all sorts of things like this can cause computer
problems, and that, of course, complicates debugging and troubleshooting
enormously. (Cats, much as I like them, are bad news around computers; I
think I regaled this list with the great cat-modem caper a while back?)
So perhaps the watchword should be Expect the unexpected or something
like that.

Patricia