Word crashed. What caused that? Why did it happen? Was it something I did?

In the day to day “Have you restarted it?” life of a CSBmonkey, there are a few constants, and one of those is the inevitable crashing of these application thingies.  They crash like drunken teenagers on prom night heading home at 5 am in mom’s mini van.  Often, the results are the same.  Split skulls from the impact, brains hanging out and spread across the pavement.  The anguish and the misery that follows a crash is inevitable.  That was important stuff involved in the crash… the graduating high school student and the yearly budget someone forgot to ctrl-s after working on it for 12 hours.  The prom night crash is obvious, though.  Booze.  A little toke after that.  Some grinding and slurping late into the night (what teenager isn’t going to stay awake for that after all?).  The avoidance of teenage high school shooters and slashers (bringing up the question of exactly why we haven’t seen any prom night shootings… I didn’t say it was gonna be a pleasant question).  I mean, it takes everything a 17 year old can muster to get through that night, but computers… well, they’re basically infants and yet we put such high expectations upon them.  “Don’t crash honey, this budget analysis is due tomorrow… oh, nah, we don’t need any protection!  It’s more fun without me sheathing myself with a ctrl-s.  I mean, doesn’t it feel good?”

There are reasons that those application thingies crash.  Good reasons.  Let’s look at one of the most frequently used applications by our friends in the Pacific Northwest, Word.  Here are the various reasons this CSBmonkey has experienced crashes in that most venerable of applications:

*Corrupted normal.dot file
*Corrupted MS Word prefs
*Damaged application
*Damaged word document
*Attempting to access a very large document across an unstable network and the connection being lost
*Sun spots
*Solar flares
*Magnetic fields too close to the computer in the permanent location
*Computer hates being used: a.k.a. the “I’ll show YOU!” syndrome
*Client has failed to meet the computer or the application’s emotional needs
*Screwed up auto-save feature not working properly (probably due to sun spots)
*Auto-Tracking of changes on in those apps (Did you REALLY want to track those changes?  Probably not.  Way to go.)
*Documents were read only and yet let you keep adding stuff to them.  That was funny, wasn’t it?
*Computer has the dumb.
*Infestation of gremlins
*Possession by one or more demonic elements
*Infestation of regular gremlins that don’t know what to do with data
*Karma: computer, client, company client works for, etc. up to no good or was up to no good in the past and now coming back to haunt everyone via the “freeze up Word” method (more common than you think)
*Internet Explorer 7 whacked the crap out of the Office install, and now it’s been uninstalled.  Praise be!  Everything will work fine after this.
*Small, microscopic black hole nexus point at the location where computer freezes up regularly and causing atoms in device to not react in a normal and predictable way
*Similar to microscopic black holes, there could be weird gravity at the location that causes atomic corruption on various levels.  IF ONLY WE COULD REVERSE THE POLARITY WE COULD DETERMINE IF GRAVITY ISSUES ARE AT WORK!

You can see that the reasons are varied, and many.  Your ethics and morals and status as a decent human being weigh heavily in wether or not your computer works properly.  Don’t think Word isn’t watching you.  Don’t think that Excel doesn’t lurk under your bed at night reading your thoughts about the babysitter (or the baby sitter’s brother).  Purity of thought.  Or essence, these are the things that keep a computer running properly.  That and a good tech.