Have You Tried Turning It Off

There is a sentence in customer support that functions the way a magic spell functions in a fantasy novel. It is the spell of first resort, the one you cast before all others, and like all powerful magic it must be spoken in the correct tone or it will rebound upon the caster. The sentence is: "Have you tried turning it off and on again?" Carol, at the desk to my left, had told me about the spell during orientation. "It resolves about a third of everything," she said, with the calm of a woman describing a load-bearing wall. "But you have to mean it. They can hear it if you don't mean it." I did not, at first, mean it. On my fourth call of the morning a man told me his dashboard was "doing the thing," and I asked, in what I believed was a warm and collaborative voice, whether he had tried turning it off and on again, and he was silent for a moment and then said, "Don't you patronize me, son," and I realized Carol was right. They can hear it. So I worked on it. I practiced the spell at my desk between calls, under my breath, the way an actor practices a line. Have you tried turning it off and on again. Not flat. Not bored. You have to deliver it as though the idea has only just occurred to you, as though it is a small bright gift you are genuinely delighted to be able to offer. Have you tried — and here a little lift of curiosity — turning it off, and on again? By Wednesday I could cast it clean. And here is the thing that troubled me, the thing I want recorded: it worked. Caller after caller, the dashboard came back, the printer woke up, the sync resumed. A third of all human suffering on that helpline, just as Carol had promised, was resolved by the oldest spell in the book. It troubled me because I am an engineer. I have spent six years believing that problems have causes, and that causes can be found, and that finding them is the whole dignity of the work. And here was a spell that did not find the cause. It simply — and I struggled with this — it simply wiped the slate. It said: whatever went wrong, let us agree not to investigate it, and instead be born again. Toby, on my right, saw me brooding about it. Toby had been in the support pit for two years and had the haunted serenity of a man who has stopped asking why. "You're thinking about it too hard," he said. "Off and on again isn't a fix. It's a mercy. You're not solving their problem. You're giving them a clean morning." I wrote that down. A clean morning. I think Toby may be the wisest person in the building, and the building contains four vice presidents.