One quiet Tuesday morning, the IT helpdesk team received a call that would soon become the stuff of office legend. The user on the other end sounded genuinely frustrated and a bit perplexed. “Hi,” they began, “my keyboard isn’t working. I think it’s invisible.”
The technician, regulator of all things computer-related, blinked twice to make sure they’d heard correctly. “Invisible?” they asked, cautiously hopeful this wasn’t some kind of prank. The user assured them it wasn’t. “I’m sitting right here at my desk, but I can’t see my keyboard anywhere. I’ve looked all over, but it’s like it vanished.”
Trying to be helpful, the tech walked the user through the usual troubleshooting questions. “Is your keyboard plugged in? Can you see the keyboard on your computer screen? Is the computer itself working?” The user replied, “Yes, I’m on the computer now, typing to you, but I still don’t see the keyboard. I think it disappeared from my desk.”
The technician imagined the user sitting and typing on thin air and stifled a laugh. They asked if the user was maybe sitting too far back or had somehow misplaced the keyboard itself. After a brief pause, the user sheepishly admitted, “Oh. I didn’t realize the keyboard was a physical thing. I thought it was just supposed to be floating on the desk, like those virtual keyboards you see in spy movies.”
Relieved and amused, the technician reminded the user gently that the keyboard is a tangible device and suggested checking under some papers. After a moment, the user happily declared, “Found it! It was under a stack of documents. Sorry about that.”
The tech logged the ticket as “User requested help to find invisible keyboard,” and added a note: “User unaware that physical keyboards are physical.” The incident became a favorite tale, often retold with laughter at team meetings as proof that sometimes the simplest tech problems are entirely new concepts to some users.