Things Start Working When I Show Up

I get calls, emails, and chat messages about a problem. By the time I reach the person's desk, whatever they were dealing with is working again. They say it wasn't working. My joke to them is that things start to work correctly when I show up.

It's an easy line. The hard part is what comes next. Something that works while I'm standing there doesn't prove the original report was wrong. It only proves that, right now, I cannot see the failure. If "it's fine now" ends the conversation, we can lose the chance to learn what happened.

The employee needed help with something that interrupted their work. Now they're trying to show me, and it won't happen again. The joke shouldn't sound like I doubt them. Not being able to reproduce an issue limits what can be investigated. It's not a reason to dismiss the person reporting it.

There are ordinary reasons a problem can disappear. These are possibilities, not diagnoses. Some problems are intermittent: a connection drops, a service stalls, or a shared resource gets busy, then recovers before anyone arrives. Someone may repeat the steps more slowly while being watched, and the second pass works. Timing or sequence may have mattered. That doesn't make the first failure imaginary. And sometimes a restart, a timeout, or a simple wait has already cleared whatever was stuck.

So when everything looks fine at the desk, the useful question isn't only whether it's broken right now. It's what can still be recovered about the moment it was.

A few details help. The exact time, even a rough window. A screenshot or the exact wording of an error, not a paraphrase. What they clicked or typed right before it failed. Whether anything changed around then, like a password update, a new device, a software prompt, or a cable moved. Those details give me something to investigate after the visit. I don't have to be standing there when it happens again.

The person who reported it already did the right thing by saying something. Nobody should have to diagnose their own computer before asking for help. I can keep making the joke. But I'd rather understand what happened than take credit for fixing something I didn't touch.