This is Steve Robbins.

Welcome to the Get It Done Guys quick and dirty tips to work less and do more.

It's a fine day at Bernice's plant shop, green-growing things.

The holiday season is upon us and even the Audrey twos seem to be in good cheer.

Businesses brisk and customers are lined up waiting to buy foliage to sacrifice to their

respective holidays in a manner dependent upon their particular religion.

And then, the cashier screams, help, the enter key isn't working, I can't ring up any sales.

The new computerized cash register has gone wild.

Is this the end for green growing things?

Melvin, the IT supergenus, leaps into action from the back room,

but is he fast enough? We buy technology to make life simpler, and so it does, until the

moment it does something unexpected. We know that we only addressed the email to our best friend

Randy, so why in the world did those art pictures end up going to

everyone in the company directory? The technology companies assume that it's all human error,

but that's hardly true. Sometimes it's human error. Often it's a bug. It can be a configuration

issue. You just don't know. Computers are so flexible and amazing that they can break in a thousand

different ways over and over.

What started as the machine working for us quickly becomes us struggling with the machine.

The biggest insult, of course, is that the same problems happen over and over, just far enough apart in time that the second time they happen.

We kind of remember having that problem before, but we're not quite

sure. Keep a computer maintenance lock. Never fear. You can be rescued from your electronic

bondage with something as simple as a notebook into pen. Start keeping a maintenance log and track

...