A few minutes before an important Teams meeting the other day my computer informed me that something was blocking the camera lens. This was news to me because, as far as I could see, there was absolutely nothing in front of it. I peered at the little hole at the top of the screen, gave it a wipe and tried again, in case whatever was obstructing it could be dealt with by the corner of my sleeve. Apparently not.
I checked the camera permissions, which were all switched on. The computer was allowed to use the camera. The app was allowed to use the camera. Everybody had permission to use the camera except, it seemed, me.
So I carried on with the meeting without the camera. Everyone was deprived of my smiley face and had to make do with the pleasure of my voice. After the meeting having established that we were all in agreement about what the camera was supposed to be doing, I moved on to trying to make it do it. This involved opening settings, closing settings and returning to settings in the hope that something might have changed while I was away.
The camera continued to insist that it was blocked.
“Yes,” I told it. “You’ve mentioned.”
I reset things. I uninstalled things. I attempted to reinstall the things I’d uninstalled, at which point the computer announced that it couldn’t find a camera. This felt like an unnecessarily spiteful development. We’d started with a camera that was blocked and had now progressed to not having one at all. I’d been trying to improve the situation, but apparently I was dismantling the computer one helpful suggestion at a time, courtesy of ChatGPT and various online sources of equally questionable wisdom.
By now, the swearing had become less occasional. There was quite a lot of “What the hell?” interspersed with increasingly personal remarks about a machine that had, until that morning, done very little to offend me.
I eventually found the camera in the hardware list, which was a relief, although finding something and persuading it to work are evidently separate departments. I clicked on properties, looking for some useful information, and was rewarded with the word “Camera”. Well, thank goodness for that. Somewhere in the proceedings I also encountered something called “Camera AI Effect Opt In”. I had no idea what this meant, but it sounded considerably more ambitious than what I was asking for. I didn’t need effects. I didn’t need artificial intelligence. I would have settled quite happily for a small, badly lit picture of my own face with our disaster zone of a kitchen behind me.
After the best part of an hour, my son wandered into the kitchen.
“Oh yeah, there’s a switch here. Flick that and it’ll uncover the camera lens.”
He reached up, flicked a tiny switch and the camera worked.
Just like that.
He reached up to the top of the screen and moved something so small that I hadn’t noticed it existed. The camera worked.
I leaned forward to inspect this switch, which I couldn’t properly see even with my glasses on. Somewhere along the way, somebody had decided that a useful physical control should be made practically invisible. Presumably this keeps the computer looking sleek, which is a great comfort when you’ve spent an over and hour calling it progressively abusive names.
The most irritating part, of course, was that the computer had been right all along. Something was blocking the lens. It had told me this repeatedly, and I’d responded by taking bits of its software away.
Still, I feel there was room for a slightly more helpful message. “Camera blocked” is all very well, but “Before you uninstall anything, check the tiny bloody switch on top” would have saved us both a difficult afternoon.
My son returned to whatever he’d been doing, having completed the repair without opening a single settings menu. I was left with a working camera, several windows I no longer understood and the uncomfortable knowledge that I’d probably have carried on for another hour if he hadn’t waked into the kitchen.
I feel a right fool.
