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I pretty much credit my IT career with my early understanding of the power of the placebo.

I worked in a law firm in the late 90s that had recently switched from Word Perfect to Word, complete with very gnarly macros. Often the Win 3.11 machines would virtually grind to a standstill, and the quickest way to free up the memory was a simple reboot.

Lots of the secretaries (and pretty much any user today, of course) would swear black and blue that they had already rebooted and it was "something else" causing the problem when their machine went to snail pace.

So my Advanced Desktop Support technique was to go to the affected machine, run up the command prompt, run a "dir /s" on the C:\ drive, make some muttering sounds as the output scrolled down, THEN do the reboot. Apparently I was the "best" desktop support person in the place because I "went the extra mile to *fix* the problem". Fast forward to being a shiny new NT administrator in the Ops area 6 months later.