There are so many other reasons to lose patience with some of my coworkers, tech illiteracy is nowhere near the top of the list. If anything, I like helping people with tech.

“It would be a good value if the value was good, but it isn’t.”

I can’t think of any problems I’ve faced in over 3 years. I have an app on my phone that I can use to temporarily disable my Pi-hole if I need to do some testing, but I don’t know if I’ve ever had a situation where the Pi-hole was the source of a problem. Definitely not a maintenance headache. I run an update on it every now and then, but only because I see a notification that there is one, not because there’s something going wrong.

You’ll sometimes hear IT people use “Layer 8 problem” which is a reference to the OSI networking model. The model has 7 layers. It starts at layer-1, the physical layer (the literal wires that the signals flow through), and ends with layer-7, the application later (things like http, ftp, etc.).

“Layer-8” isn’t technically part of the OSI model, but unofficially it refers to the human layer, or the user. When IT people are troubleshooting an issue, trying to identify where in the model the issue is happening, “layer-8” is a tongue-in-cheek way of saying “there isn’t an actual problem… the person is the problem”.

Another good one is the “ID10T” error (read as “I-D-ten-T”), which looks a lot like “IDIOT” when written down. It means the same thing.

Exactly. Layer 8 problem.

Thanks! I had already worked out the first bit and the last bit, but I hadn’t thought to look at that middle part. I appreciate your time and insight.

I don’t mind. I’m locked into this one because it functions well, handling all of the idiosyncrasies that can be involved in tennis scoring (3 vs 5 game sets, tie breaks, etc.).

It started as “I could use this for table tennis scoring at our cabin, it can’t be the at hard…” (we use tennis scoring instead of ping pong scoring because we’re all tennis players), but now I just feel like it’s a challenge I want to figure out.

Bingo. For me, it’s been “5 years away” for 33 years.