What do a backup job that always reports a warning, a hardware alert that never seems important, and the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster have in common?

They all illustrate a phenomenon known as “normalization of deviance” — the tendency to accept abnormal conditions as normal simply because nothing bad has happened yet. Over time, warnings become familiar, familiar becomes acceptable, and acceptable becomes routine. Eventually, luck runs out.

A user called to report that most of their installed fonts were missing from a document. It was an unusual problem, but it sounded familiar. Years earlier, I had stumbled across the same behavior on my own computer and discovered an unexpected connection between printers and fonts.

The lesson wasn’t really about fonts or printers. It was about how curiosity and understanding can turn a strange problem into a familiar one.

Back in the days of Windows 3.x, I discovered a keyboard shortcut that didn’t seem particularly useful. Years later, that obscure bit of knowledge solved a problem that left many users stumped: a window that had disappeared off-screen.

The lesson wasn’t about Windows shortcuts. It was about curiosity, experience, and how seemingly unimportant discoveries often become valuable when you least expect it.