I’m just beginning a short little contract here in China for a month or so to pay some bills and help a friend out. Part of doing work in the computer industry in China is that 1000$ USD for a computer is an outrageous sum of money. Those of us with Apples are either reckless spendthrifts or simply lucky beyond belief (Mac OS X itself is simply not understood … is that a program that runs on top of Windows?). So, this morning, when one of my coworker’s computer broke, I groaned. Not only was it likely to be a huge hassle, but the likelihood of having spare parts or another working computer were quite remote.

In short, he had no network. The cable lights simply did not come on. We switched cables. We unplugged and re-plugged in everything in the office. We uninstalled and re-installed drivers. We fiddled and diddled with Windows ad nauseum. We stole other departments’ switches. No joy.

Finally, in an act of desperation, I opened the computer up, tapped the network port aluminum housing a few times, looked sagely at at the current state of affordable PC hardware (it is pretty cool looking inside those things), and then tried again …. it works fine now.

What the—???