Yesterday, tapping away at my keyboard on my laptop, my screen flickered black. I sighed. “Maybe it was a one off with some background process”, I thought, going about my business. It was 3:22 pm.

It flickered again. I started paying attention. It did it again.

Now I paid attention to the screen because when I write, I generally don’t look at the screen. I’ve been typing that long where I can look outside at the trees blowing in the wind and only glance at the screen as I need to. As I just did with that sentence.

Now, looking at the screen, I noticed that the text was lagging in LibreOffice Writer and that Microsoft 10’s ‘circle of death’ was spinning right before the screen flickered again.

“Great”, I thought, “I get to be distracted by Microsoft Windows Shenanigans again.”

I brought up the task manager (I call it the task mangler) and waited. There went the flicker again after the circle of death. The task manager also flickered and that would indicate that the problem was likely a video driver.

I had officially changed from writer to troubleshooter at this point, having completely lost my original train of thought. I’d allowed Microsoft to do it’s annoying update fairly recently, so I went through the process of reading up on the changes in their Knowledge Base, written by a group of people who have no business writing any sort of documentation. That seemed clear.

And so then I checked to make sure the drivers were up to date, which required a password I’d forgotten because I use the PIN. So suddenly I’m trying to solve that problem while Windows is trying to tell me to update something else. I updated again, per their suggestion.

The flicker remained. It even seemed to worsen. It could have been my patience steaming out of my ears in having to deal with this, and I thought very dark thoughts about people in Redmond, Washington. Very dark thoughts indeed, thoughts that I will not write here because someone might take it seriously enough to send a team to come have a chat with me. I kid, I kid! Maybe!

I’d been doing the web browsing for some of the troubleshooting on my phone because that screen didn’t flicker, and I was about to go back to writing on a separate machine – the Apple I have stashed in another room, whose keys don’t travel the way I like. I visited the bathroom and switched on the light when I saw that there was a phase issue. The light flickered.

Suddenly it all fell into place. I checked my phone’s WhatsApp at 4:39 pm to see that there had been another phase issue on the compound for an hour.

My laptop was acting out because it thought that electricity was disconnecting and reconnecting through the surge protectors. I had recalled noticing the battery charging showing up in the lower right from time to time but since I was hyperfocused on a particular branch of troubleshooting, I had completely missed the basics.

I had forgotten where I lived – Trinidad and Tobago – and I had forgotten the compound had been suffering phase issues since they closed down the main power station in the area, PowerGen, some time ago. Since around that time, we’ve had phase issues at Victoria Keyes, which I wrote to Trinidad and Tobago Electricity Commission (T&TEC) about to not avail.

The WhatsApp chat was useless, filled with things that I had responded to and answered over the course of the last 3 years about what happens on the compound when we have phase issues. It’s one of the reasons I ignore the chat; I hate repeating myself and I often feel the need to explain things to people who explanations bounce off of, despite my best efforts in trying different ways to communicate it. Electricity, as common as it is, confounds people.

I took a break, T&TEC sent a truck, they reset a fuse on a local transformer and I thought to myself that they really need to deal with this consistent problem again. One of the people applauded the T&TEC response time, which was stellar, but… we keep having the same issue over and over again.

So – I was troubleshooting the wrong thing to start with, and because I find the signal to noise ratio of the chats at Victoria Keyes inordinately low, I ignored them. I spent an hour chasing the wrong problem and, had I simply remembered where I lived. In a country where even water is an issue because everyone likes to kick the can down the road, which impacted my community up until a few days ago.

Microsoft’s off the hook. Poor governance and government run enterprises, through a shell game of government owned corporations, struck again.

When troubleshooting, the first step is to check your instruments. In Trinidad and Tobago, it also means checking the quality of your electrical connection. Fortunately, computers don’t require water, so we don’t have to have that in the troubleshooting guide.

There. I feel better now.