Somebody in my impressionable youth told me, “If you can’t fix it with a hammer, get a bigger hammer.” Amazingly enough, I’ve had that work for me on occasion.
Usually doesn’t have anything to do with delicate computer technology though. I’m not sure a bigger hammer would have brought my waterlogged cellphone back to life.
Imagine my surprise then, when I did a search on iPad troubleshooting. The symptoms? Where the screen should be displaying white, was a dull red. Not just backgrounds. The shades of white in photographs and other images were the wrong color too.
She admitted that she had dropped the iPad. It was kind of slippery, she said. It may have come out of her hands. Once.
This revelation is being shared – not as a public shaming for letting an iPad hit the ground – but as a tutorial on how the thing can be repaired.
With a hammer.
Actually, I didn’t take a hammer to it, but I probably would have if I’d had one handy. In this day and age, when we have trouble with something, the first thing we do is Google it. Which is exactly what I did.
Unbelievably, the search results brought up a string of conversations written by folks with the same glowing red iPad screens, all of whom admitted the tablet had been dropped. Not so unbelievably, many of them blamed the baby, a neighbor, or their mother-in-law.
Almost every posting was bragging about having repaired their iPad by:
SMACKING IT ON THE BACK.
I immediately had a mental image of a newborn iPad being readied for its journey into the great computer world and receiving that life-bringing Smack! Picked up the tablet and gave it a whack. Nothing. Whack. Nothing. Third whack. Nothing.
Back to YouTube. The image is of an actual video in which a successful computer repair person brought their sickly iPad back to health with a hammer. (If you can’t fix it with a hammer…) Picked up the iPad. No hammer at the ready, so I grabbed the salt shaker from the table. Tap. Tap. Double Tap. Nothing.
Back to YouTube. After rereading those really happy people who revived their beloved tablets with the Smack-Method, I thought I’d give it another try.
Baby slaps. SMACK.
Red gone. Color correct.
iPad: Back in business.
The moral here?
It would follow the lines of that bigger hammer thing, but would include some newborn slaps and a salt shaker – which sound kinda like a bad science fiction movie plot.
Always happy when things work out, however crazily!
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