One quiet Tuesday afternoon, I received a ticket from a user who described their laptop as “completely frozen, like it’s in a deep sleep and refuses to wake up.” The user was understandably frustrated because their deadline was approaching, and traditional troubleshooting steps like force shutdown or holding the power button hadn’t worked.
Curious, I asked a few simple questions to try and diagnose the problem. Had they tried unplugging the laptop? Yes. Had they removed the battery? No, because it was built-in. Had they connected an external monitor to see if it was a display issue? No again.
Then the user added something peculiar: “I read online that sometimes laptops freeze if you don’t touch the screen. So, I started gently tapping it like it was a windowpane. It didn’t help, but the sound reminded me to take a deep breath.”
This struck me as odd but also charming—someone combining IT troubleshooting with the patience of a zen gardener. I told them to continue this gentle tapping while I remotely accessed their device. The screen remained stuck, but then I noticed something unusual. The laptop’s keyboard was covered with sticky notes, tiny toys, and even a plastic dinosaur.
I asked about this decoration, and the user admitted it was an “energy booster” setup. To humor them, I suggested gently tapping the sides of the laptop like one might tap on a door to “knock some sense into it.”
To my surprise, the user reported a faint clunk and then, miraculously, the system began to respond. The screen flickered, and the login prompt appeared as if by magic. I suspect the gentle physical jolt helped shake loose a slightly unseated internal connection or cleared a temporary hardware hiccup.
Afterwards, the user thanked me profusely and said they’d keep carrying a tiny plastic dinosaur for good luck and “therapeutic tapping” as a last resort. It was a reminder that sometimes in IT support, the oddest approaches can yield surprising results—and that a bit of humor and empathy goes a long way in calming tech frustrations.