Tom’s Tech Tip: Don’t Jump to Conclusions as a Certified Legal Nurse Consultant

Yesterday morning, well before most RNs are groping about in the dark for their first cup of coffee, I went into my office and noticed my computer was shut down. That’s pretty abnormal for me as I usually leave it running 24/7. In fact, I only shut it down when I travel, take it to the office or I bring it home from the office. So to find it shut off was disconcerting.

I first wondered whether Windows^® had downloaded updates and forced a reboot that stalled (not unusual). Other thoughts crossed my mind (hard drive failure) but I pushed them to the back of my cluttered brain at the same time I pushed the Start button. The computer obligingly started making winding up noises then shut off (hard drive failure). I pushed the button again, same result (hard drive failure). In a state of disbelief and panic I repeated the procedure and result one more time (definitely hard drive failure).

Now all those bad thoughts (hard drive failure) immediately pushed themselves to the front of my brain and took residence. I wondered when the last time I’d run a back-up was (the day before luckily). I wondered what work I’d done in the time between that back up and the present. More frighteningly, I wondered how long I’d be offline. This is a busy time and one or two days offline while waiting for a new hard drive, re-imaging and debugging is one or two days too many. I must admit, I was frightened. To quell the fear, like any crisis-facing RN in a hospital job, or Certified Legal Nurse Consultant working a medical malpractice case, I took a couple of deep breaths to stop hyperventilating, made the panic subside and started to make a logical diagnosis.

First thing I checked to see was whether my dual monitors and other peripherals still had power (their power lights showed “on”). Like, hopefully the example of every one of my CLNC^® amigos, all those devices were plugged into the same UPS back-up battery as my computer. Then I checked to see whether the monitors and laptop were plugged into the surge protection-only or battery-backup side of the UPS (all were in the backup side) while the other devices were in the surge protection-only side. Making sure the UPS was powered on (and it was) I pushed the computer’s power button one more time with the same failed result.

I knew one of two situations were ahead of me. Either I had the worst-case scenario, a failed hard drive, or I simply had a bad power supply or a pulled plug somewhere in the system. Since I could hear the hard drive start to spin before failing, I was hoping for the best (bad power supply). So before I started pushing all the panic buttons and waking tech support who wouldn’t be able to do anything until they had the laptop in their hands (possibly 10:00am), I pulled the laptop out of the dock and changed the battery, pressed the power button and… glory, glory, hallelujah, the laptop powered up as normal.

That meant that the UPS’s back-up battery had failed without warning but was generating enough power to light the power lights on my monitors and peripherals. The computer must have run all night on the ever-dwindling battery, eventually dying just before I went to work that morning. I immediately ordered a replacement battery for the UPS unit, found an extension cord and quickly rewired my desk. I was back up, running and hard at work, all within 45 minutes and all well before my Tech Support staff started work and asked me, “Did you check the power?”

What’s the take-away for legal nurse consultants? Simple, when your computer fails don’t leap to conclusions. Certainly a crashed hard drive is what first springs to mind, but sometimes it really might be something simple. When diagnosing computer problems, and even in difficult situations in your legal nurse consulting case analysis, I recommend you use Occam’s Razor – the simplest explanation is usually the correct one. Here the simplest was loss of power, not complete computer failure. Don’t leap to conclusions (like I almost did) or you might find yourself leaping to a bad one.

Keep on Techin’, (simply)