This was originally posted privately to avoid potentially naming my employer publicly.

Recently I traveled for work, which meant I was sometimes using my work laptop "straight", as opposed to with a dock (and external monitor, keyboard, and mouse). I can't do that long-term for ergonomic and vision reasons, but sometimes you need to for shorter periods.

While doing so I learned just how much of a pain it is to work around the trackpad. I was using a USB mouse (because some things are just essential, and easy to carry), but kept brushing the trackpad while typing. Having my mouse cursor be randomly moved was wildly irritating.

I found no help on our internal wiki or by asking random coworkers. Google opined that I could change this in the bios, but I only want to turn off the trackpad if I have a mouse, thank you very much -- not looking for a permanent change. It's possible I won't always have a mouse, after all.

So I tweeted a "does anybody know how to do this?" message, naming the manufacturer via hashtag, and got no response initially. And meanwhile, during the trip, I taped a piece of paper over the trackpad to make it stop annoying me.

Time passed. Then, over the weekend, I got a response from a support account, and we traded a few messages before that person told me to send email to a generic-seeming address. In fairly short order it was determined that the regular consumer support couldn't help me because I have a commercial model (whatever that means; I assume they'll sell to anybody), so I got handed off to somebody in the department that supports corporate customers, and they wanted a serial number and other stuff, and it got escalated once more for unknown-to-me reasons. And I said hey, I have no reason to believe anything's wrong with my laptop and please may I just have some information, but the machinery was chugging along.

Somewhere in there I started to wonder how much trouble I was going to get into when it came out that I indirectly work for the manufacturer. I wouldn't have called customer support for a specific hardware problem, but my request for general information -- to the Twitterverse -- turned into a ticket being handled as a possible malfunction, in a matter of hours once it got going. After a little more email, I got a call from a friendly and competent support person who pointed out the invisible magic button where I can turn the trackpad off (or on), and that completely solves my problem. And she didn't seem to care who I worked for -- bonus.

But it sure feels like I should have been able to find that out without the support call.

Coming to the world of SQL databases from the world of object-oriented programming is...different. I'm starting to realize why some idioms are different, and I'm sure there are tons more that I haven't noticed yet and am probably getting wrong. But that's what learning experiences are for.

Consider, for example, a system where you have authors with associated publications. If I were designing a system to track that in, say, Java, I would define an Author class and a Publication class, with bidirectional links (Author would have a collection of Publications; Publication would have a collection of Authors (because sometimes authors collaborate)). But in a database table design you don't do that; you define a Persons table that has columns for some unique ID, name, and anything else about the person, and you have a Publications table that has columns for things about the publication like a (book) unique ID, title, publisher, genre, etc, and also the unique ID from the Persons table for the author -- and I'm not sure if multiple authors means multiple rows in the Publications table or if there's some way to do collections. But the point is that a Person doesn't know about its publications -- when you want that you'll do a JOIN between the two tables and then you'll have what you need. Connections between flavors of data are external to the data. This makes sense, but it's going to take a little getting used to.

(Y'all who are way ahead of me on this should please feel free to point out any errors in the above and save me mis-learning some things. Thanks.)

Lots of comments, as you'd expect.