Laughter Blog 2: An Odd Student Professor Experience

I find that most often when I laugh uncontrollably, the story does not sound nearly as funny when I recount it to others who were not there.  Events that cause uncontrollable laughter tend to be personal and dependent on the situation and the people who experienced it with me.  One such situation happened to me this past summer.

            Over the past year, I have been working on my senior thesis project.  As part of this study, participants wore a physical activity monitor that must be downloaded onto the computer in my professor’s office.  Fortunately I had plans to visit Fort Worth in July for a friend’s wedding, and this was the perfect opportunity to reset the monitors.  There was only one problem: my professor was spending his summer in Canada and would not be there to help us through the process.

            A friend who is also researching with this professor and I were able to borrow a key to his office and call him so he could walk us through the steps, but then we had to turn on his laptop, which is connected to his desktop computer.  This seems like it should have been a simple task.  Just push the power button, right?  Well, all five times that we tried this, the desktop came on, but nothing happened on the laptop.  We even went so far as to take out the battery and put it back it.  Still nothing.  By this point we were getting pretty frustrated and concerned.

            This is when my professor decided to ask us if the desktop had ever come on.  We told him that, of course it had, but still nothing from the laptop.  Much to our surprise, he began laughing and told us that this was exactly what was supposed to happen all along.  The laptop does not turn on until you log in on the desktop.  That was when we starting laughing too and could not stop.  We were laughing in relief; laughing at our own stupidity; we just could not stop laughing.  We had spent over half an hour turning the computer off and on only to find out it had been working the whole time!

            Thinking back on it, it is amazing that such a simple thing could make us laugh so hard.  However, even now, every time one of the three of us brings up that day in July we start laughing again.  Moments like these are not soon forgotten and instead help to grow relationships and add deeper meaning to the time people spend together.  Sometimes it is not the actual hilarity of the situation that makes one laugh uncontrollably, but rather it is having just the right chain of events lead up to a moment that can turn an initially frustrating situation into one that we will remember and laugh about for years to come.