Computers Just Know When to Break

I'm just trying to get the last part of "the other book" finished at the moment. So of course this would be a good time for my word processor to break. Suddenly Word 2007 wouldn't start. When it did run, after a wait for ages, it just sat there grinning at me. If I tried to do anything it froze up again.

Of course the first question I could ask is "How does it know I'm under pressure here?", but I long ago stopped worrying about this. Computer systems just know. Many years ago, when I was writing lots of presentations, my copy of Powerpoint developed the ability to crash whenever I thought "I really need to save now". It did this three times in a row.

I've had so much experience of things failing just when it would be most inconvenient that I'm now convinced that computers just know when to put the boot in.

After some serious digging around, and a near re-install, I found out the cause of my Word problem. I use a network printer at work which I have set as the default printer (which is kind of sensible, since it is where I do most of my printing). This means that Word looks for it when it starts up. Of course the printer can't be found on my network at home, so Word just sulks for ten minutes and then gives up the ghost.

At tip. If you have the same problem, just change the default printer on your PC to one that is always there (for example the document writer) and the problem goes away.

I was feeling very smug this morning when I figured that out and fixed it, and reckoned that I'd got one up on the universe.

Then my monitor abruptly stopped working....