While sitting enjoying some nice tea, in this case Chocolate Chai Pu-erh tea at our local tea shop I had my iPad and my Bluetooth keyboard set up and I’ve been wandering through my Drafts-stored blog-prompts looking at things to write about. While writing about my Nook HD a pair of ladies approached me and asked me about the setup they saw me using. What it all was and how much was it and how did it work. So I gave them an impromptu sales pitch for Apple technology, the iPad, the Smartcover, and the Bluetooth Keyboard. They asked why I was using a physical keyboard and I confessed that I type a little too fast for the processor in the iPad to keep up. When I try to write The, the t and h are usually missed because my taps are too fast and I end up with E. Almost always. So I use a physical keyboard because that can keep up with my typing speed. They were impressed and wandered off to their table to enjoy their chocolate treats.

I was marveling at being an Apple Store employee without of course being one, yay for Apple evangelism (!) and I got back to work writing. Then another lady came up to me with her Kindle Fire in her hands and she asked me for help. Something about sitting here with a tablet and keyboard marks me as “Mr. Technical Support” and her problem was as she described to me “My Kindle says I have too many windows open. I went to Best Buy and the Geek Squad guy was no help, I was wondering if you knew how to fix this problem?” and I smiled at her and looked at her Kindle Fire. It’s worth noting that I’ve never really ever touched a Kindle Fire before, I don’t know what it’s system is like (I assume it’s a variant of the Android OS, maybe) and I invited her to sit down next to me while I looked at her Kindle Fire device. I suggested the best path would be to open up a browser on my iPad and bring up Google and search Google for “kindle fire too many windows open” and see if there was anyone else who had this problem and how they fixed it. As it turns out, there is no clear way (from what I could see) to actually close apps in a Kindle Fire. Now, it’s important to note that I’ve never actually touched a Kindle Fire and I’m not actually a part of Amazon’s Technical Support team, and all I really have is cleverness and Google. I found the solution for her and showed her how to hard reset her Kindle Fire. It’s like it is for any tablet device, hold down the power button and keep holding it until the device is forced off and then press the power button again to turn it on. Once her Kindle Fire came back on I asked her to try to bring the error on again and she opened an eBook on her Kindle Fire and said “It should show the error now… wait, it’s working! You’re my hero!”

And now she knows how to fix her own problem with her Kindle Fire.

Apparently I am “Mr. Technical Support Guy” after all. I should wear a shirt and have a Square reader and take credit cards for my services. $10 for Answers. LOL.