Adventures In IT #5: Dell Goes Ghetto

It dawned on me recently that I haven't updated my blog much* and have been thinking of something worthwhile to post. Fortunately, inspiration struck at work today...

*Darn you Facebook - sucker of time and life force!

Replacing a hard drive in a laptop is easy. It is even easier when Dell sends one to you with the operating system already loaded on it. All I have to do is swap out the drive, start it up and let it run through its paces. Naturally I was quite surprised when I got error saying that the system failed to nobulate.

Nobulate? Huh?

I never heard that word before, so I hopped onto Dictionary.com and looked it up - no entry found. Dell has apparently created it's own lingo. So next I entered the word into Google, and for the most part found posts of fellow humans who have also encountered this error and were obviously confused. There was, however, one site that provided a definition: urbandictionary.com

For those of you too lazy to click on the link, here is the official urban definition of nobulate: The rapid movement of a control nob on apparatus (Ex: Don't nobulate the volume, just pick a setting.)

Wow. Did we really need a singular word for that action? Was "playing with the dials" that hard to understand? And why did Dell feel the need to use this word to describe a technical issue?

As it turned out, I ended up chatting with a Dell Technician later on, and asked him to clarify the message. He or she* explained that it simply meant something failed to initialize and had me reboot the computer.*

*Sorry, Indian/Pakistani names are very hard to determine gender-wise when all you have to go on is its printed form. It reminds me of an old episode of Head of the Class where Jawaharlal mentioned that half of the people from his country were named Jawaharlal. When someone asked what the other half were called, he quipped : Mrs. Jawaharlal.

*The funny thing about this solution is that the error message made it very clear in capital letters: DO NOT REBOOT THIS SYSTEM!

So there you have it. Nobulate could mean to initialize or to play with volume knobs, depending on your background. Makes me feel sorry for all the poor confused urban computer geeks out there...