Phantom fault cause discovered

There's a common phenomenon in the IT industry - I know there's a name for it, I just can't remember what it is right now - that frustrates computer users to no end. It's the phenomenon where a user experiences a computer fault, usually software related, which magically disappears and is not reproducible when the support person shows up.

I believe I have discovered the cause of such a manifestation. Computers are deathly afraid of the techs. Just watch a computer react to a stern look from an IT support person. They squirm. No but seriously, I think I have the answer to why faults magically disappear when IT is on the scene.

One of the standard behaviours that computer users exhibit is the lack of patience or 'rushing' as it is also known in IT circles. The most basic and common example of this is printing. You know how it goes - the user has a document open, they click 'Print', nothing happens. They hurriedly click it again, and again, each time with decreasing delays between clicks. By the time they are done, they've requested no less than 20 print jobs of the document. Unfortunately, either the program, the printer or something in between was incapable of performing the initial print task immediately in the first place, and the same issue is going to prevent the other 19 attempts from succeeding as well.

When the support staff come along, the user is frustrated. But they will purposely slow down to give IT time to see the flaw in action. "See?" Click. "It doesn't print!" After a several second delay, the process works like a charm, embarrassing the user to no end. "Seriously, it didn't work for me..."

I see it happen a lot when (in a work environment) during computer boot-up, there are scripts running to automatically configure everything. I've witnessed people attempt to boot-up the computer, lose patience with boot-up time, press and hold the power button to force a power-down, then boot-up again. Like that was going to magically speed things up. If the script took n seconds to finish running on attempt number one, it will likely take n + 10 seconds on attempt number two and n + 20 seconds on attempt number three. Then IT shows up, turns the computer on and they wait together. When the user tries to interrupt the script, the support person politely (or not) tells them to relax and wait. Seconds later, the boot-up is complete.

The problem is that if the user had employed the same measure of patience to let you see the fault in all of its glory when they originally performed the action, everything would have gone smoothly. And I believe that this is the cause of most phantom faults that disappear when the tech shows up. The user slows down.