Is it a Bug?

Has anyone experienced this before or is it just me? Before a couple of months, I had this strange thing happening. Whenever I unlock my office  PC, it gets logged off. Initially I thought something had tampered windows explorer. Then again today, the same thing happened. But this time, it got restarted. Something smelled fishy. And upon squeezing past experience out of my memory, I found out what the actual reason is. Damn, all the time  I HAVEN’T LOCKED the screen at all. Most of the time, when I come back to my desk after a break and see a black blank screen (because of the save-energy-save-world self of me who sets power options for monitor), I immediately press C-A-D and begin typing my password and press return. Then, the I-am-still-functioning CRT monitor slowly powers up and I will see all my windows closing. The interesting thing is when I didn’t lock the PC and do this accustomed humdrum to unlock the screen, the fate of my next five minutes depends on which one of these comes first in my password: K or L or S. K, I will be locking the screen, L, logging off and S+return shutdown. Since I chose passwords that are not too difficult to type and which I use often, I keyboard it at reasonable speed, that my CRT monitor never keeps up to my speed. I would  have pressed return before it starts to show anything and the damn machine would be shutting down even before I realize.

Now, is it a bug? I think so. Anything that prevents intended behavior should be a bug. The guys at MS should have expected this. When I press any key that’s not a hotkey for any of the action, they should have had the focus off the screen. This may be a Heisenbug: the fact that I am trying to lock it down means I am carefully unlocking the screen and that means I have altered its cause – my inattentiveness to the fact that I haven’t locked the screen. The typical Observer Effect.

~ by sarav on March 10, 2009.