I think each of us computer experts should at least once in a while face a technical situation that completely befuddles us. Maybe this way we can get a sense of what it's like to be a normal "non-computer" person.

I'm not talking about the challenge of learning a new programming language or framework. We know that will have its difficult spots. I don't even mean chasing down the trickiest bug. That's what we were born and trained to do!

I mean something that you would think should be simple and obvious, but you're stuck, have no clue what to try next, and think the whole world must just be broken.

This just happened to me. Night before last, my car's ESC (Electronic Stability Control) light came on. I thought I must have bumped the ESC disable button, but tapping it a few times did nothing.

A little while later, the Check Engine light came on to keep the ESC light company. Uh-oh. I explained to my friend that it didn't mean we had to stop right now, unless that light started blinking. It didn't blink, and the engine sounded fine.

Isn't it funny how a car has this one all-purpose light that could mean just about anything, and the car knows which of those many things it actually is, but it won't tell you?

Unless you're a mechanic. Or unless you're smart, like me, and had an OBD-II device that comes with an app for your phone. Now I can just read the code myself!

So I opened the app, tapped Connect, and there it was: Motorola Roadster 2. Um, that's my speakerphone. No OBD-II?

I went to the website and read the manual for my OBD-II device and found my mistake: I needed to push the Bluetooth pairing button on the device before I could connect. So I pushed it, saw the blue light blinking, went back to the app and tapped Connect once more. No sign of the OBD-II device, just the speakerphone again!

Something was really messed up and I had no idea what it was. I'd connected to the device before without any problem, but I'd also done a factory reset on the phone since then, so whatever it was wasn't working any more. Rebooting the phone didn't help, and turning the car ignition off and on a few times didn't either. I gave up for the night (and the next day).

Finally today I got the courage to try again. First, of course, I tried all the things I tried before, thinking that maybe this time they would work.

No such luck. Finally I got the idea of going to the Bluetooth menu on the phone to see if I could find the OBD-II device that way.

You can guess the rest of the story: after I pushed the pairing button on the device, it showed up in the Bluetooth menu and I paired the phone with it like I'd done a long time ago before that factory reset. And then the OBD-II app connected and showed me the error:

P0504 Brake Switch "A"/"B" Correlation

I looked that up online and found the good news: indeed this was not an engine problem but a brake switch problem that also disables ESC. And the bad news: I'd been driving around with no brake lights and thought I had an engine problem instead.

It was only sheer luck that I happened to think of checking the Bluetooth menu. When the OBD-II program showed me the list of available devices (only the Motorola speakerphone), it didn't say anything about what to do if my OBD-II device didn't show up in the list. And when I found their manual online it didn't offer any clue either.

I was just supposed to "know" that I should go to the Bluetooth menu before trying to use the app.

I still tend to think of myself as some kind of computer expert (in fact many of you have used code I wrote), but I'm grateful for this experience - it taught me to have a bit more sympathy when people get so frustrated with their computers and devices.