Earlier this week, I spent a little time tracking down a bug in an Access form a friend sent me to look at. It had that classic behavior where the form would freeze whenever I tried to set the record source dynamically in the Load event. I threw everything I had at it - until I finally dug into the query behind the form and found a field named "Date". Reserved keyword. Rookie move. Renamed it, boom, problem solved.

Now, that's not something I'd normally think to check, because I would never make that mistake building a database from scratch. But it goes to show - if the foundation is weak, the whole house can fall apart, and the bug won't show up until you've already painted the walls. Sometimes, it waits until you've hung the curtains. I didn't even look there until I'd eliminated every place it should have been (in the form, or the VBA code).

And no, this friend is not one of my students. He did not learn from me. I was doing him a favor. And yes, I am making sure he reads this article. I shall ridicule him mercilessly. (It's cool. We go way back.)

And of course when I told him about his mistake, he just shrugged it off. "Well, it shouldn't do that."

Well... yeah. But it does. That's what reserved words are all about and why you don't use them for field names. Access isn't going to pop up a friendly tooltip saying "Hey, bad idea." It's just going to break. Quietly. Confusingly.

What's funny is that moment right there - "it shouldn't do that" - is exactly what trips people up, in tech and in life. Instead of asking why something's broken, they fall back on how they think it ought to work. That's a dangerous shortcut. The universe doesn't care how you feel things should behave. Databases, physics, chemistry, biology, math... they all run on what is, not what you wish was true.

One thing I've always loved about tech is that computers do one thing gloriously well... they follow rules. (1) Computers don't care about your feelings or opinions. They don't respond to vibes or gut instincts. They respond to rules and logic. Either it works because you followed the rules, or it doesn't. If you have a problem, stay curious, follow the trail, isolate your variables, and test your assumptions, you'll usually figure it out. That's programming. That's science. That's reason. That's logic.

And that's where things get frustrating. Because this same friend? He's one of those guys. Super sharp in his field - finance, numbers, spreadsheets, mortgage trends. Brilliant. But then he'll post something on social media about how vaccines have tracking chips, or that 5G causes brain fog, or how some guy on YouTube "proved" NASA is lying to us. I'll counter with links to peer-reviewed studies, government data, major science publications. And he'll come back with... nothing but feelings and fallacies. Stuff I've already torn apart right here in the Captain's Log.

And I genuinely don't get it. How can someone be so rigorous with Excel formulas and mortgage rate curves, and then turn around and throw logic out the window when it comes to science? It's like watching Spock decide warp theory is a conspiracy because he read something sketchy on a tricorder blog.

It reminds me of the Next Generation episode "The Wounded." Captain Maxwell - respected officer, solid record - becomes convinced the Cardassians are secretly rearming. But instead of gathering evidence, he acts on a hunch. He starts attacking ships. People die. And when Picard confronts him, he says, "If you were right - just one shred of proof might have been enough. But you have no proof."

Now here's the twist: it turns out Maxwell was right. The Cardassians were up to something. But that doesn't justify his actions. Because he didn't know - he guessed. He acted on instinct and suspicion, not facts. And that's the trap. Even a blind squirrel finds a nut sometimes. That doesn't mean we hand the squirrel a phaser and say "go run security."

The lesson is the same whether you're debugging a database, discussing vaccines, or commanding a starship: you don't get to skip the part where you test your theory. Being right for the wrong reasons is still the wrong way to operate.

Ask questions. Test assumptions. Demand evidence. Don't default to belief - default to discovery.

LLAP
RR

(1) And I'm talking about computers that are running properly. Obviously, if you've got a broken machine, bad memory sticks, or whatever, you're gonna have problems sometimes. But if the machine is running correctly, it's going to follow the rules. Unless you're running Windows Vista.