Computer calamity

Last night going home on BART, a man sat down right in front of me. He immediately took his laptop out and put it on his lap. He fired her up. Then he started poking at the screen. Which made me, my husband and the guy sitting next to laptop guy look at what he was doing.

This is basically what we all saw minus the beautiful cat:

I'm assuming this man was something techie -- I admit, I stereotyped because he was Indian -- probably an engineer. So he's got to be smart, right? Well, what do you think he does? He continued to poke and wipe the screen, like that was going to fix it.

The guy next to him kept staring at him and the laptop screen, and it really seemed like he was going to burst because he probably knew poking and wiping the screen weren't going to do any good, and he really really really wanted to tell laptop man that. But he never said anything.

The man started shutting down his computer and restarting it. He did this about 3 times, poked the screen some more and then finally gave up. All this occurred between San Francisco and Oakland, so that's a good 7 minutes. He got off at the first stop out of the tunnel. I envisioned him getting off even though it wasn't his stop and calling his LAN person in a panic.

"Help! My computer screen is all swirls and whorls and I poke and I poke and nothing fixes it!"