When this blog started, newspapers were still writing, “so-called Web logs, or ‘blogs’ …”
From February 26, 2015, “Of pocket lint and ‘political correctness’“:
But I was also embarrassed because I had allowed myself to be inconvenienced and bothered and worried for weeks over nothing more than pocket lint. What I had feared was some potentially large problem turned out to be something easily resolved with a paper clip. Seeing how simple and obvious the solution was made me feel kind of stupid because I had been kind of stupid.
That has happened before. And it will happen again.
There are two morals to this story.
First, of course, is that the charging dock on a cellphone can get clogged with pocket lint. If yours starts to get a bit unreliable, shine a flashlight in there and poke around a bit — gently — with a toothpick or the end of a paper clip. That should take care of that for you. Good to know.
The second lesson here is just as practical, but it has wider implications. The second lesson here is that briefly feeling kind of stupid can be a Good Thing. It means there’s a solution that you hadn’t seen before — maybe even a quick, easy, obvious and no-cost solution. And briefly feeling a bit stupid — owning up to the fact that there was something simple you had overlooked or failed to think of — is a small price to pay for the relief that comes from no longer having to worry about problems that turn out to be easily solved.
There’s a perverse impulse to get defensive when confronted with anything that might make us feel embarrassed or force us to admit that we maybe did something foolish or unthinking. And that defensiveness can lead us to resent or to reject the simple advice that can free us from what may turn out to be wholly avoidable and easily resolvable problems.
It was kind of stupid of me to jump to the conclusion that my phone was broken in some expensive way. But it would have been far more stupid to stubbornly cling to that conclusion, refusing to believe that Brad knew more than I did and refusing to let him help me by not just solving my problem but showing me how to avoid it in the future.
(Over the past seven years, phone technology has improved a lot, but charging ports still remain vulnerable to pocket lint. That part of the post is still timely, but the reference to “political correctness” now seems dated. The memo went out a couple of years ago that common decency and regard for others will no longer be sneered at as “political correctness,” but henceforth as “wokeness” and “cancel culture.”)
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