By Melvin Durai
While driving the other day, I spotted a bumper sticker that said, “Has anyone tried unplugging the country and plugging it back in?” If only it were possible to do that. Many people around the world would want to unplug their countries and get them to function well again.
The area around each plug would be heavily guarded, with a barbed wire fence around it. Only those with security clearance would be permitted to enter the immediate vicinity of the plug. Others would buy tickets to view the plug from a distance, using binoculars to get a closer look.
Husband (using binoculars): “Wow, it’s bigger than I thought. And there are letters on the side of it.”
Wife: “What does it say?”
Husband: “It says, ‘Made in China.’”
The idea of “unplugging” a country is amusing to me because “unplugging” is one of the first things I do when an electronic device gives me trouble. In the case of my laptop computer, I don’t need to unplug it—I just restart it, which prompts it to do a whole lot of updating before allowing me to see if it has fixed itself.
In the case of my printer, I pull the plug out of the socket and replug it right away. And just like that, it starts printing something I tried to print three years ago. Unplugging also works with my digital clock radio, microwave, wifi router, and TV.
Why does this work? Well, by cutting off a device’s power, you are saying to the device, “Guess who has the ultimate power? You’d better do what I want you to do, or I will unplug you permanently.” You are basically threatening to stop feeding the device. This is similar to what a parent says to a misbehaving child: “Off to bed! No supper for you!”
If you ask the experts, however, they will tell you that unplugging a device works because many devices have tiny computers with built-in software. When you unplug them, you are causing the “internal computer to reboot, which clears out the device’s memory and forces it to reload and re-execute the software from scratch,” according to technology writer Benj Edwards, author of an online article titled “Why does unplugging a device fix so many problems?”
Edwards contends that unplugging a device is only a temporary solution. “It doesn’t fix the underlying problem that caused the malfunction, hang, or crash in the first place,” he writes. Unplugging a device just once is temporary; unplugging as a regular habit is permanent. I’d rather unplug my printer once a week than take it to a repair shop.
If unplugging a device helps it function better, does unplugging have the same benefit to a human? Humans unplug in many ways. Some people unplug themselves from their phones, computers and television sets. Some people unplug themselves from their relatives. Some people unplug themselves from civilization.
This isn’t the same kind of unplugging, of course. Few humans would want to have an actual plug, but many would probably be okay with a reset button. A reset button would clear a person’s memory, allowing them to feel like a new person. Some people would choose a “hard reset,” restoring themselves to factory settings. Others would choose a “soft reset,” clearing just their recent history.
If we did have a reset button, we wouldn’t want anyone else to have access to it. Otherwise many of us would be crawling around and sucking our thumbs—like we just left the factory.
