During the morning tutorial at OSCON, Dan’s MacBook Pro refused to boot. We tried a few tricks, but gave up fairly quickly, since we didn’t want to miss any of Damian Conway’s Perl Worst Practices tutorial. Fortunately, there’s an Apple Store across the river at Pioneer Place. So we met up with Alice as Dan, Al, Brad, and I headed over to the mall for our lunch break.

Unfortunately, the first appointment Dan could get at the Genius Bar is for 8:00 AM Wednesday morning. The girl who entered his appointment asked about the problem and, while he was describing it, I noticed that the computer wasn’t turning off. I flipped it over, took out the battery, replaced the battery, flipped it right, and turned it on. We were hopeful at first, as the login screen came up, but the screen went dark again.

Or did it?

Upon closer inspection, the display was on, but the back light wasn’t. Al stepped up to squint at the display and attempt to reboot the machine so he could reset the NVRAM. In what I expected was a futile move, I pulled out a flash light and aimed it at the Apple logo behind the screen. It illuminated just enough for Al to locate the cursor and get the system to reboot.

After the reset and the reboot, Dan’s computer is working again. I asked for a genius badge, but they didn’t seem interested in letting me have one.