Real story.

I was in my late teens. My parents were dragging me to a tiny, kinda culty church every fuckin’ weekend. Didn’t really have much choice. (Hell, I hadn’t even told anyone yet that I thought Christianity was 100% bullshit.)

I had a reputation for knowing my stuff about computers. (Because normies – particularly boomer normies like Pastor Dipshit – don’t know the difference between programmers and PC support.)

So, one Sunday after the service, Pastor Dipshit asks me to look at his computer. His Outlook was giving an error dialog. Something about not being able to find an email on disk. Clicking the “ok” button just resulted immediately in another dialog, and while the error dialog was present you couldn’t interact with the main window, so this rendered Outlook unusable.

Turns out he’d gone and deleted a bunch of files from the filesystem. Like by navigating from “My Computer” down to the directory where Outlook stored its files. Rather than deleting emails through the Outlook GUI the way one is meant to.

So, I mused “hmm, I wonder if it’s just giving one error message per email that was affected.” I could see in the window behind the error dialog that the total count of emails in his inbox was only a couple hundred or something.

So I commenced to clicking as rapidly as I could. Probably about a minute of clicking later, no more error dialogs and Outlook was usable again.

And everyone marveled at my “genius.”

I wouldn’t be surprised if he didn’t learn his lesson and continued to delete random files from the filesystem, but he kindof lost what was left of his connection to consensus reality and scared even my culty family away and we quit attending that church not terribly long after that, so I couldn’t say for sure.

wasn’t there a Microsoft error with a frozen screen that could be resolved by moving the mouse continuously?

Prettyuch sums up why I switched to Linux, no more oopsie popups, more actual info on what went wrong

I was shocked when I first started working in the tech industry how many people will still click a ‘request’ or ‘send’ button multiple times if it doesn’t IMMEDIATELY go through or grey out the button.

Then they wonder why it gives them 14 copies of the same error.

“Well, how many times did you hit ‘request’? 15? Hmm. What could it be? We’ll never know.”

On Windows I really only do this to get the popup that lets me force close the app

I wonder if it was just me but I heard that clicking a dead spot could help when a computer was freezing or lagging