Magical Teleport

If you’ve worked with me or read my ITmail, you know I enjoy creating non-computer analogies to help define and explain computing terms.

To remind my clients that rebooting their machines can often fix performance issues, I offer the analogy of a zipper that has come off its track: "take the zipper all the way to the bottom and re-thread it so it will once again glide smoothly.”

Here is another analogy about re-booting. I didn’t make it up, but I like the scenery:

Imagine you live in a huge, ancient city with winding streets that have many twists and turns. You want to get from your house to the grocery store. Somewhere along the way you aren’t paying attention and you take a wrong turn. Now you are lost. You don’t recognize any buildings. What do you think is more likely to help you — going around and around in circles, or magically teleporting back to your house and starting again from the beginning of the route you already know? That’s what power cycling [shutting down and rebooting] does. It takes a device that’s trapped in some kind of problem [like being lost], picks it up, and puts it back down at the starting line. (social media credit to KDY_ISD).

My first reaction was that if magical teleporting is an option, it should just drop you at the grocery store(!), but if this imagery reminds you re-booting is an option, it's worth the extra trip.