Solving

In the movie Tank, there comes a point where the tank is mired in a field, and the yahoo local law is about to seize it. An onlooker grabs a coil of cable from a truck and starts off across the field. Hey, the driver of the truck shouts, what are you doing? The coil-taker looks up and says, simply, Stealin.

I like linear thought.

Yesterday, one of the people at work discovered in the afternoon that his connectivity to the Big Gihugic (but in its own way kind of cute) Software Company network had gang agley, as Robert Burns would have said. It had worked in the morning, but in the afternoon, he could only connect to the local LAN. Being surrounded by techies who all thought they knew what the problem was, he spent a fair amount of time futzing around with it, and eventually (since we DIDN'T know, this being Networking, Where Dragons Live) he called some guy he knew who actually practiced that dark art. I listened to him talk to this fellow for a while, and what got me what that while the person he talked to knew more about networks than me, he didn't have a particuarly linear style. It seemed as if he was saying Try This...um...that doesn't matter...Try this. And I'd think Well, dummo, if it Didn't Matter, why did you try it? I know there could have been a reason -- perhaps it was something where it didn't matter if it didn't pan out, but if it did, that was a significant indicator -- but it just didn't FEEL as if this guy had a logical path in mind.

Now I know that in diagnostics, you don't always use a logical path. You pick off the most common, easily checked, low hanging fruit first. And sometimes you just 'play a hunch'. But when that doesn't work, I think you need to be able to present an aura of competence that says that you've thought the matter through, you know how it's supposed to work, and you know how you're going to parse the problem to eliminate nulls and flush out the solution. This guy -- well, put it this way: he didn't do any better than me.

I did, incidentally, clue the guy with the problem into WinXP System Restore. Amazingly, he'd never heard of it.